Office 365 provides a degree of backup and archiving services with all its user plans. Home users get a little, top-tier enterprise plans get much more. Yet it’s important to remember that SaaS apps like Office 365 are office productivity tools — though they may have related features, they are not data protection and management services.
Osterman Research studied Office 365 feature sets and costs for different enterprise plans and concluded that, given the feature and function gaps in data protection and compliance, “Many third-party solutions will do a better job at filling these gaps and should be evaluated and considered by decision makers.”
The report lists a number of issues in great detail. Some include:
- Data protection — Relying on the Recycle Bin for accidental deletion protection is tricky, because the Recycle Bin itself can be accidentally (or maliciously) cleared. Retention Policies are very complex, and don’t necessarily protect against rogue administrators. The app uses its own platform to backup data — not a best practice. Recovering lost or corrupt data can be an involved process, and restoring Sharepoint sites requires Microsoft support.
- Compliance — Capabilities for managing eDiscovery searches lack workflow or project tracking, and searches can be slow when compared to actual data protection and management services. Auditing templates require using PowerShell.
- Ransomware protection — Though adding-on Microsoft Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) provides extra protection, the Safe Attachments functionality is comparatively vulnerable to certain types of ransomware. There are SaaS data protection solutions that add anomaly detection to improve IT defenses.
Clearly, Office 365 is a robust and capable productivity offering. Yet what it provides in the way of data protection can be complicated and costly. Again, it is not a data protection and management app.
Fortunately, Druva is a SaaS solution that protects and manages enterprise data across all endpoint, data center, and cloud workloads such as Office 365. Built on AWS, it delivers globally accessible, infinitely scalable, and completely autonomous enterprise data resiliency and compliance. Customers drive down costs by up to 50 percent by freeing themselves from the burden of unnecessary hardware, capacity planning, and software management.
Download the Osterman Research report for more details.
Next Steps
Learn about cloud-native, SaaS Druva solutions for protecting and managing data across endpoint, data center, and cloud workloads.
Read our solution brief — Druva for Office 365 — Addressing the Critical Gaps of Data Protection and Information Governance in Office 365.