Today, business is driven by intangible assets and innovation. These intangible assets exist within companies on hard drives, cloud providers, and in conversations between employees. The availability of these assets can make the difference between executing deals and thriving as a company or becoming another statistic as a failed business. Attackers and bad actors are also keenly aware of this fact and have invested time, resources, and money into methods of acquiring and holding these assets hostage.

One of the most popular business productivity applications is Microsoft 365. Microsoft 365’s suite offers various internal and external communication applications. This platform contains information critical to business continuity and must be protected with high availability. A key component of this is ensuring a separate copy of your data is kept in a different privileged domain.

Understanding the Need for Backup Copies

A popular data standard for business-critical assets is the 3-2-1 Rule. The 3-2-1 Rule is a data availability standard that’s adopted by companies to provide resiliency from a multitude of attack types. In this standard, there should be at least three copies of your data on at least two different media types, with one offsite in a separate privilege domain. Unfortunately, the increased popularity of Microsoft 365 comes with an increase in threats from attackers as well.

Threats can include but are not limited to:

• Accidental deletion: Human errors or malicious actions can result in data being deleted from Microsoft 365, either permanently or in undesired formats.
• Retention policy gaps: Microsoft 365’s default retention policies may not suit the specific recovery objectives for each organization, especially for long-term retention or compliance scenarios.
• Security threats: Cyberattacks and ransomware can compromise Microsoft 365 data and expose it to loss or corruption.
• Legal and compliance: Many organizations need to retain data for long periods of time and retrieve it quickly for legal or regulatory purposes.

Due to the increased risk to your data, the 3-2-1 Rule is becoming standard practice for intangible assets like Microsoft 365 data. This effort results in needing a layered protection approach, which includes a backup copy in a separate privilege zone.

How Veeam Microsoft 365 Backup Copy Works

A backup copy is an additional copy of data that’s made to create an extra layer of resiliency between business-critical data and bad actors. This copy is often sent to ultra-resilient data storage with clear privilege separation from production data. This means that your data would sit on an immutable storage type and require separate administrative access to alter the data compared to the production environment. This prevents attacks from compromised accounts in both internal and external threats.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 offers backup, backup copy, and restore function flexibility. This includes:

• Backup jobs: With granular scope control, backups of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams can be made with service level agreements (SLAs) that suit your business needs.
• Backup copy jobs: Backup copies have the flexibility to separate copies of backup data to additional strategic media either on-premises, to another cloud storage, or an immutable object storage repository.
• Flexible recovery: Both granular and bulk recovery options are available to suit any kind of restore scenario.

Setting Up Veeam Microsoft 365 Backup Copy

Getting started with creating backup copies is easy with Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365. Once a backup job has been created with your desired scope, there are only a few clicks to make and settings to select.

1. Object stage: Determine which object storage best suits your company’s goals. Object storage can be any on-premises S3-compatible storage or cloud storage provided through AWS S3, Azure Blob, or another cloud provider S3-compatible storage.
   To create a backup copy job from a backup job, right-click on the backup job and select “Add to backup copy job…”

Then select your desired storage.

1. The last step is to set your desired schedule for backup copies to take place. The scheduling options allow for immediate copies of your data, or ones taken at specific intervals.

If there is a time frame where a backup copy job should not run, then check the ”Terminate the job” box, and the window for the backup copy job should be configured.

Best Practices for Optimal Protection

Microsoft 365 applications and services provide essential business productivity applications to companies, which makes it absolutely necessary to protect this platform. By following a couple of guidelines, you can ensure you are providing optimal resiliency in your data protection strategy.

1. Implement the 3-2-1 Rule: This guideline ensures you have three copies of your data on at least two different media types with at least one of those copies stored in a separate location and with different access than your production data. This guide provides resiliency from the data copies and privilege separation.
2. Run restore test: Running restore tests regularly ensures that you are backing up the necessary data in cases of data loss or integrity scenarios.
3. Immutable storage: Immutable storage is a special kind of storage that prevents the alteration of data once it is stored. It is the cloud and datacenter version of Write Once

Read Many (WORM) tapes. By using this ultra-resilient storage, you can ensure that once your data is stored, bad actors cannot alter or delete it.

Important Considerations

Backup copies are essential to any data protection strategy, but some considerations must be made to ensure they are optimized for your business.

• Cost restraints: Object storage is optimal for storing large amounts of data, but it can come with some associated costs when dealing with cloud vendors. When storing data on cloud providers, there’s the cost of consuming space, and some vendors have additional costs around accessing storage APIs, and data transfer both in and out of your cloud provider.
• Transfer rates: If the backup copy moves from one site to another, ensure the amount of data being transferred fits within your desired backup copy window. If the data throughput speeds do not satisfy the amount of data being transferred, you may need to call your ISP or cloud provider.
• Immutable storage: When using immutable storage, ensure the correct retention is configured; otherwise, you might be keeping a large backup longer than intended. In most cases, this retention cannot be altered later.

Paying close attention to these three points can ensure you are not left with undesired backup copy results.

Going Beyond Protection: Additional Veeam Microsoft 365 Backup Capabilities

Protecting your intangible assets in a resilient configuration is essential to safeguard your company from data loss. The next step is to ensure your assets can be retrieved in an easy-to-manage ecosystem and in a format that makes sense for your specific use case. Beyond the backup and backup copy scope, Veeam offers:

• Veeam Restore Explorers: Veeam Restore Explorers are tailor-made for each application data type and offer everything from granular file recovery to multi-user and site restore.
• Self-service Restore Portal: The web-based Self-service Restore Portal offers a quick and easy way for end users to access their data in cases of small data loss. This portal also provides elevated privilege access options to orchestrate restores on behalf of other users. These options offer a great way to enable other users to recover data without giving them elevated privilege access to the backup server or Microsoft 365 environment.
• Advanced search: For backup administrators, the Restore Explorers have advanced search and export options for your data. These features can be helpful in cases where eDiscover files need to be handed over in court cases or for compliance.

Conclusion

In this blog, we have seen how Veeam’s Microsoft 365 backup solutions can provide various data recovery options, depending on your business’s needs. This product is the optimal choice, whether you’re a backup administrator that needs to perform advanced search and export operations or an end user who wants to restore their data through a web portal. These features, along with backup copies, enhance the security and availability of the data stored in Microsoft 365 and reduce the risk of data loss and compliance issues.

Download Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 today and experience the peace of mind that comes with complete data protection.

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