Microsoft maintains a shared responsibility model for Microsoft 365 where they are responsible for maintaining platform uptime while the customer is responsible for the protection and long-term retention of Microsoft 365 data. This was a situation that Transgourmet knew all too well.
The French wholesaler of food and hygiene products for catering, bakery, and pastry professionals, migrated to Microsoft 365 to streamline its collaboration capabilities from multiple tools to one. Leveraging Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams for email, document sharing, access to external data, and video conferencing, Microsoft 365 is business-critical for the company, according to Christian Giusti, head of infrastructure, telecoms, and operations.
But after the migration, it was reliant on Microsoft’s data retention capabilities, not a third-party data protection solution, which left it vulnerable to ransomware, accidental data deletion, and data corruption.
Three reasons to back up Microsoft 365 with a third party data resilience solution
Backup and restore functionality for Microsoft 365 applications such as Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams, is often a misunderstood aspect of Microsoft 365. Microsoft itself says it best in their service agreement: “We recommend that you regularly back up your content and data that you store on the services or store using third-party apps and services.”
One reason to back up Microsoft 365 with a third-party solution is that Microsoft 365 data is prone to user error. There’s no question that end users and even admins occasionally delete files accidentally, overwrite files as they create and collaborate, or synchronize files incorrectly, potentially leading to data corruption. A second reason is that ransomware prevention is not enough — organizations must be prepared with cyber resiliency and establish adequate recovery measures — ensuring their data can be bulk-recovered by IT reliably and quickly.
A third reason is the risk of non-compliance. All three of these reasons were why Transgourmet sought a third-party data resilience solution to protect highly valuable collaboration data for 3,100 employees across 46 sites.
The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud delivers comprehensive backup for Microsoft 365
With a single solution, organizations like Transgourmet benefit from the combined advantage of Druva innovation and the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS) high-performance infrastructure. The Druva Data Resiliency Cloud operates transparently to elastically scale compute and storage resources as Microsoft 365 backups grow — without IT intervention. Druva unifies Microsoft 365 backups into a single data pool that simplifies search, eDiscovery, and legal holds while ensuring the organization is in compliance with international and government regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), legal hold requirements, and corporate standards.
Druva delivers comprehensive backup and data protection for Microsoft OneDrive, Exchange Online, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams as well as endpoints, data centers, SaaS applications, and cloud-native workloads. It complements Microsoft 365 by filling data protection gaps without dedicated hardware, software, or resources. Druva’s secure 100% SaaS platform allows Microsoft 365 data to be open and accessible to unified governance policies and ransomware protection while allowing organizations to obtain critical insights into their Microsoft 365 data and projects.
Ransomware, accidental deletion, data corruption, and non-compliance risks eliminated
Before implementing the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, Transgourmet was at risk for ransomware, accidental data deletion, and data corruption — but not anymore. For Transgourmet, the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud stood out from its competition for several reasons. “The autonomy of the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud, its retention capabilities, and the fact that we did not need to invest in any infrastructure, hardware, or software made Druva stand out,” Giusti said.
“Before Druva, we didn’t store data in the cloud. In only a few months’ time, Druva paved the way for us to trust the cloud. Today, we can keep valuable Microsoft 365 data as long as we want — six months, one year, or longer. We are so pleased with Druva that we are considering using it to back up our data center servers, including the VMs,” he added.
With the Druva Data Resiliency Cloud successfully deployed, Transgourmet now has a multi-layered defense against ransomware. Giusti’s team is confident its Microsoft 365 backup data is protected from encryption and deletion should a ransomware attack hit their organization.
For its Microsoft 365 data, Transgourmet is able to facilitate compliance with GDPR and its requirement to protect personal data. Compliance with GDPR is critical as administrative fines can reach 20 million euros or 4% of annual global revenue.
In the future, Giusti’s team is looking forward to eliminating its on-premises disk and tape backup infrastructure in favor of cloud solutions. “Druva has opened our minds to the fact that we can save much more data to the cloud with immediate access,” he added.
What’s next?
Read the Transgourmet case study to learn more about the multi-layer defense it now has against ransomware and the ability to comply with GDPR.