Microsoft 365 Backup Goes Live

Key Takeaways:

• Microsoft 365 Backup provides businesses with a robust solution to back up and recover all OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange data.
• It’s designed to ensure protection against ransomware attacks, accidental deletions, and other data loss scenarios.
• Microsoft 365 Backup operates on a pay-as-you-go model.

Microsoft has officially launched its Microsoft 365 Backup solution for commercial customers. The new offering provides businesses with a robust way to quickly back up and recover their OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange data.

Microsoft emphasized the importance of data protection for businesses due to the annual rise in ransomware attacks. Earlier this year, Microsoft 365 Backup was launched in public preview to help customers tackle these increasing threats.

How does Microsoft 365 Backup work?

Microsoft 365 Backup is a robust solution that offers comprehensive data protection by backing up OneDrive accounts, SharePoint sites, and Exchange mailboxes. It ensures fast recovery from common business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) scenarios, such as ransomware attacks, accidental deletions or overwrites, and malicious employee actions.

“Microsoft 365 Backup provides business continuity peace of mind while offering fast backup with frequent recovery points and low average recovery times at mass scale. Many customers will see average speeds for mass restores that are 20 times faster than traditional means of backing up and restoring large volumes of Microsoft 365 data,” Microsoft explained.

With Microsoft 365 Backup, organizations can restore files, sites, and mailbox items individually or in batches. Customers can recover an entire SharePoint site, a specific OneDrive account, or select items within an Exchange mailbox. This service allows businesses to quickly backup and restore their Microsoft 365 data within hours and retain it for up to 12 months.

Where does Microsoft 365 Backup store data?

The Microsoft 365 Backup solution is built on top of a storage layer called “Microsoft 365 Backup Storage.” It maintains multiple redundant backups within the Microsoft 365 trust boundary to ensure data security and reliability. This platform enables independent software vendors (ISVs) to build applications with the Microsoft 365 Storage API. This capability provides additional options for data management and protection.

Microsoft 365 Backup pricing

Microsoft 365 Backup is available for purchase through the Microsoft 365 admin center. It is also offered as a standalone pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) solution for commercial customers without any additional license requirements. Once enabled, administrators need to create backup policies for each workload (OneDrive, SharePoint, or Exchange).

Microsoft 365 Backup operates on a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) model, priced at $0.15 per GB per month of protected content. It covers the cumulative backup size of mailboxes, SharePoint sites, and OneDrive accounts, including live accounts, online archives, and deleted items stored for up to one year.

Overall, the launch of Microsoft 365 Backup has received mixed reactions from IT admins across various social media platforms. In a Reddit thread, many admins appreciate the convenience of an integrated backup solution but express concerns about pricing and the need for immutable backups. Moreover, some IT professionals also highlighted the implications of relying solely on Microsoft for both primary and backup data storage.