Expert IT Leadership Blogs

If you are not aware already, you need to make note of Microsoft’s Shared Responsibility Model when it comes to customer security responsibility.  Microsoft (and SRS) want to make sure you understand your part of the deal as defined by Microsoft’s Shared Responsibility Agreement.

Microsoft is not responsible for issues that arise or result from:

• Any unauthorized action, or lack of action, when required (or from your employees, agents, contractors, or vendors – or anyone gaining access to the Microsoft network by means of your passwords or equipment); OR
• Your failure to follow appropriate security practices relating to required configurations; OR
• Your failure to properly use and configure supported platforms; OR
• Your failure to follow any Microsoft policies for acceptable use or use of their service in a manner inconsistent with the features and functionality of the service, or use inconsistent with Microsoft’s published guidance.

The Microsoft agreement states that Microsoft (as “Controller” of their data) is completely responsible for application availability with a guarantee of 99.9% uptime. However, as the “Processor of the data” (you) it is solely your responsibility to deal with any issues arising from one of your users hitting the delete key whether intentionally or by accident. It also means that if your company experiences loss of data resulting from malicious or fraudulent activity – the buck stops with you.

So yes, that is quite a lot of shared responsibility and that’s why SRS emphasizes the importance of understanding what data you should be backing up, how to properly back it up, and also how to secure all of your Microsoft 365 Modules in the process.

Office * Exchange * SharePoint * OneDrive

What happens when email (Exchange) goes down. Nothing. Productivity comes to a screeching halt and stress goes through the roof. Missing documents (Office/OneDrive)? Disaster. The more employee collaboration you have (SharePoint) the higher your productivity and the higher the risk that someone will hit a wrong key. A sound back up strategy will:

• Secure your Microsoft 365 and Office data from cybersecurity threats;
• Backup your entire organization or groups of mailboxes on Exchange;
• Quickly recover mailboxes down to individual emails with point in time precision;
• Recover and restore entire SharePoint site collections, libraries and documents and
• Back up all or only specific OneDrive accounts for easy restoration and recovery.

Your business can successfully avoid these potential disasters if you take the time to evaluate and invest in crafting a flexible, customized Microsoft 365 backup strategy.

//