How Stable is Office 365? Can I Trust the Cloud?

Is Office 365 Secure - MJF Chat

In the first of the MJF Chat series due for taping on March 4, I am the willing guinea pig lined up to answer Mary Jo Foley’s questions. We selected the theme of stability and trust of cloud services, specifically Office 365, because these questions come up time and time again at conferences like Ignite (or indeed, in our mailboxes). Even though Office 365 has more than 155 million active users, there are some who doubt the robustness of Microsoft’s cloud office service.

Ask Your Question About Stability and Trust

You have the chance to ask your own question before the event starts. We can’t guarantee to get to every question, but we will do our best. In this case, here are some of the topics we might discuss:

  • Microsoft says that I can trust Office 365 with my data. But can I?
  • Do I need backups to copy my Office 365 data to another cloud service? If I do need backups, what kind of backup service should I look for?
  • What should I do (and how do I know) when an Office 365 outage occurs (like the Teams outage on February 18)?
  • Does Microsoft’s 99.9% financially-backed SLA mean anything?
  • Is my data safe inside Office 365? Can a rogue administrator compromise information?
  • With so much change inside Office 365, how can anyone track what Microsoft is doing?
  • Is Office 365 designed for resilience or just to increase Microsoft profits?
  • If I need to, can I move from Office 365 to another cloud service or even back on-premises?

These are all questions with no right answer. Everyone’s view of a topic is clouded by personal experience and the needs of their job, so all we can do is debate the points in a way that hopefully makes people think so that they can make better decisions. Remember, neither Mary-Jo nor myself know anything about your business, so the issues we raise and the points we make are necessarily generic in nature. Now that I’ve got the health warning out of the way, we promise a good conversation that will debate some important issues.

To the Cloud and Beyond

The audio and transcript of our debate will be available soon after our chat is over, hopefully the same day. Our discussion will be better if you help us with the questions, so please take the time to enter a question based on your experience and perspective. We want to be sure that we address the most important Office 365 issues on peoples’ minds.

And if we can’t get to covering everything suggested, I’ll try to cover the missed topics in future articles. You can’t say fairer than that!