Data backup and disaster recovery solutions are nothing new, but they have become far more essential to organisations in every industry. Basically, if your business collects data, you are risking your entire business if you don’t have a reliable and secure backup solution.
As we’ve learnt in 2020, anything can and will happen from a disruption perspective. Assuming that your business won’t be hit by a devastating cyber security attack, or that your building won’t be struck by fire is simply hoping for the best – which won’t enable you to continue operating in a worst case scenario.
Ransomware attacks such as crypto locker are on the rise, and there are plenty of high profile cases of catastrophic data loss as a result of these attacks in Australia. In fact, we know that ransomware attacks in Australia nearly tripled in the first six months of this year.
While many organisations are diligently running their own backup regimes already, they may not realise that some of their enterprise system data such as Office 365 aren’t automatically being retained. To understand why a reliable offsite backup solution is so essential, we spoke to Area9’s Director of Service Delivery, Johnny Politis, and Service Delivery Manager, Aidan Daly.
Tell us about Cloud Connect and what it’s designed to achieve
Aidan – Cloud Connect is a backup solution provided by Veeam that facilitates offsite backups. Whether it’s your organisation’s on-premise backups or Office 365 backups, we can replicate copies of your backups to the Area9 datacentre. We can also adjust the frequency at which those backups occur, and how long they’re retained for based on the customer’s needs. It’s a layer on top of traditional backups by providing a secure and scalable offsite backup - which is now essential for lowering your risk profile.
Why is it so essential to ensure your Office 365 data is being backed up?
Johnny – For many people, email has become their to-do-list and filing system in one. What they may not realise is that if any of their Outlook, SharePoint or other Office 365 data is deleted, Microsoft only retains copies of those files for 90 to 180 days.
When an employee leaves an organisation or email is targeted by something malicious such as cryptolocker, there is a real possibility of data loss because there is no native back up solution built into the Microsoft Office 365 platform.
By making sure your organisation has a solid backup solution for your Office 365 tenant, you are reducing the risk significantly in losing vital business data and intelligence.
What does Cloud Connect enable organisations to achieve in a worst-case scenario?
Aidan - In a worst-case scenario, Cloud Connect gives us options to get your business running in the quickest possible time. If your building burns down with all your hardware in it, it will take weeks for new hardware to be provisioned, shipped and configured at your new site.
Instead, with Cloud Connect, we have the capability to spin up the VMs in our datacentre, do all the networking configurations, and get you back up and operating in a virtual environment at least.
Area9 recommends customers have three copies of the data: two copies stored on different storage types and one copy offsite. We provide that third crucial layer of offsite backup in our datacentre in Darwin. For data sovereignty compliance, having their data stored in Australia is crucial for many of our clients.
Have you had any clients who’ve experienced these worst-case scenarios?
Johnny – Unfortunately yes, and given the notable increase in cyber attacks we are seeing that specifically target businesses, we are expecting these worst case events to become more frequent.
Earlier this year, we had a medical practitioner we onboarded to Cloud Connect. Only two days after we’d completed their first backup to our datacentre, they were hit with a crypto locker attack.
Without our solution, they would have lost a trove of patient data and medical records, but we were able to restore all of their data within one day. Without Cloud Connect, the results would’ve been devasting for their practice.
A solid backup solution is vital to any business and makes all the difference when it comes to recovering from a disaster.
Area9 can help you create peace of mind for your organisation with a seamless and secure backup and disaster recovery solution through Cloud Connect. Get in touch with us today to discover a smarter and safer way to manage your enterprise data, including your vital Office 365 backups.
