Why You Need a Cloud-Native Backup Strategy for Your Remote Data

In today's times of datacentres and clouds growing in demand, a cloud-native backup strategy is imminent. Murali Urs, Country Manager, India, Barracuda Networks talked to DQ Channels on this topic.

Collaborative Tools and Security Concerns

Murali Urs said that since this concept was new for most companies and organisations, many challenges came to the surface along with it. With millions of people working from their home network security, data backup and best cyber-security practices became an absolute mandate. In such a scenario, cloud migration and collaborative tools are seeing tremendous growth. The average gain in monthly Office 365 users nearly quadrupled from October 2019 to April 2020, largely due to the increased reliance on collaborative work during the pandemic.

Urs highlighted that the explosion of Office 365 data raises security concerns. A recent Barracuda research highlighted increasing challenges in data protection due to the new culture of remote working. The report revealed that about 74% of IT decision-makers in Indian corporate companies had experienced a ransomware attack, 84% of the organisations were still relying exclusively on Office 365 to backup and retrieve files, and 89% of the organisations were concerned about ransomware locking their Office 365 data. Apart from this, 93% of respondents pointed out that Microsoft Teams created a data-retention concern. This clearly indicates that streamlining a backup management system has become an essential part of working and administration. Thus, organizations should seriously think about getting comprehensive and easy-to-use backup solutions rather than relying on their IT professionals to take the risk of flocking to the office during a deadly pandemic and carry out data restoration tasks.

Need for SaaS Backup

He further said that even if the email archiving services provided by Office 365 are in place, organisations would need a backup and recovery solution because archiving can only retrieve specific messages and not the complete mailbox with all of its contents. It is just a folder containing deleted items and cannot do a point-in-time recovery of emails or files from deleted items folder. Apart from this, the maximum retention period of the Recycle Bin is 93 days, after which the deleted items will be permanently deleted.

Urs said that in the midst of the dramatically rapid shift towards remote working set up and intensified dependence on SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams over the past year, protecting Office 365 data has turned out to be all the more crucial than ever before while data privacy and compliance concerns provide additional incentives for organisations to add the right kind of data protection.  A cloud-native backup strategy with a SaaS backup solution for Office 365 that is comprehensive, easy to use, and fast to get up and running enable companies to ease the rising security challenges and meet strict data protection requirement.