Cloud to Cloud backup of Microsoft Office 365 Spin

Data is the “lifeblood” of modern business.  It is easy to see how this is the case. Most companies today rely on advanced technology processes to drive their business.  All business-critical systems such as MRP, ERP, CRM, HR, and IT systems store, process, and compute data.  Employees interact daily with data through applications, files, and other technology systems.  It is no longer an on-premises only phenomenon.  Increasingly, businesses are using robust cloud Software-as-a-Service environments such as Microsoft Office 365 to store data, host services, and enable collaboration.

Your business-critical data is vital, and it must be protected at all costs.  It includes backing up data that exists in your Microsoft Office 365 environment.  This post will examine cloud-to-cloud backup of Microsoft Office 365.  What is cloud-to-cloud backup?  Why is it an effective form of backing up your cloud SaaS environment?  How can you use it to back up your Microsoft Office 365 SaaS environment?

What is cloud-to-cloud backup?

Traditional backup solutions back up data from a source system to an on-premises repository of data.  It is the approach that most are familiar with using on-premises with legacy backup solutions.  As applications and services have evolved to using cloud-backed infrastructure, applications, including backup solutions, have also evolved.  Now, instead of being required to provision on-premises backup infrastructure, including servers, storage, and networking to support data backups, organizations can leverage modern backup solutions as Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS).

A robust cloud-to-cloud backup solution can allow your organization to use the BaaS approach to protect your cloud SaaS data effectively.  Using cloud-to-cloud backup solutions bring about many advantages, including:

• Physical backup infrastructure is no longer required
• It allows a shift from CapEx to OpEx expenditures
• There is no need to overprovision
• It provides unparalleled agility in operations
• Capacity is elastic, scaling up or down
• It provides air-gapped ransomware protection

Let’s take a closer look at each of these points in greater detail.

Physical backup infrastructure is no longer required

The process to acquire, provision, and configure physical backup infrastructure can involve tremendous expense.  It includes the capital outlay for the physical infrastructure and an IT technician’s time provisioning the equipment.  In addition to the cost, this entire process could take weeks or even months to complete.

Using a cloud-to-cloud backup solution, your organization can provide backups for your cloud SaaS environment in literally minutes without any physical infrastructure needed.  Cloud-to-cloud backup allows businesses to move at a much faster pace without the traditional physical infrastructure constraints of legacy backup solutions.

It allows a shift from CapEx to OpEx expenditures

Many organizations are favoring the shift away from Capital Expenditures (CapEx).  New businesses or startups may not have the capital to spend on physical infrastructure or other expenditures.  The Operation Expenditure (OpEx) involved with subscription-based services such as cloud-to-cloud Backup-as-a-Service is much more favorable from a cost perspective.  Organizations can pay for the user licenses needed and expand or subtract these as required, making for a much more efficient expenditure model.

There is no need to overprovision

When businesses use traditional physical servers, storage, and network infrastructure, they generally buy more capacity than needed to account for the unknown of future growth and accumulating data.  It is a classic overprovisioning approach when organizations go through server refresh cycles or provision new infrastructure for additional services and solutions.  It is not uncommon to see businesses provision capacity anywhere from 15% to double or even more than the needed capacity to account for the unknown growth factor.

Cloud technologies create a paradigm shift in how businesses go about provisioning capacity.  No longer do companies have to overprovision physical infrastructure on-premises.  Cloud solutions like cloud-to-cloud backup technologies make this a consumable service for extremely efficient operations.  It helps to eliminate the costs associated with overprovisioning since this is no longer necessary.

It provides unparalleled agility in operations

Businesses today, no doubt including your own, are operating faster than ever before to meet the demands of customers and business stakeholders. Companies must be agile to compete with competitors and meet these demands.  Organizations can no longer afford to be bound by traditional IT infrastructure constraints and the long timelines to source and provision physical IT assets.  Cloud infrastructure, services, and solutions allow your business to move at a rapid pace of operations and innovation.

It includes the more traditional-oriented IT operations tasks such as performing backups.  Using cloud-to-cloud backups for your cloud SaaS environment allows your business to take advantage of modern cloud SaaS environments like Microsoft Office 365 and protect your data from the risks of data loss.  Adding capacity or growing the solution involves clicking through web-based wizards to expand your services, not provisioning physical infrastructure.

Capacity is elastic, scaling up or down

As mentioned earlier, on-premises infrastructure is a never-ending guessing game of measuring current capacity needs and accounting for the unknown variable of future growth.  When your business buys physical infrastructure to account for this future growth and overprovisions the solution accordingly, this is generally a one-way operation.  It is easy to scale up by adding physical infrastructure.  However, scaling down is a much different story.  You can’t send back the servers, storage, and networking you no longer need.

When you consider your backup infrastructure, if you over provisioned capacity to account for 50% growth and you only saw 15% growth, you essentially wasted funds on the extra 35% that you never used.  With the cloud in general and cloud-to-cloud backups in particular, you have the concept of elastic scalability.  It means that you can scale in both directions, not just up.  When you are consuming resources as a service rather than actual physical resources, this becomes much easier.

If you begin by needing to backup 500 user accounts in Microsoft Office 365 and later only need to backup 250 accounts, you can adjust your subscription accordingly.  There are no overprovisioned or wasted physical resources that will never be used sitting on-premises.  It is an exceptional strength of using cloud-to-cloud backups.

It provides air-gapped ransomware protection

Ransomware is one of the most dangerous cybersecurity risks facing businesses today, and it can wipe out large amounts of data in very little time.  New ransomware variants are becoming increasingly malicious.  These are targeting not only production data, but also backup data.  Keeping your backup infrastructure separate from your production infrastructure is vital to ensuring you have a valid copy of your protected data safe, out of reach of ransomware.

When storing backups in traditional Windows File Servers and other traditional infrastructure, security of your data backups is constantly a concern.  When you use cloud-to-cloud backups, the backups are taken care of as a service.  No on-premises or other cloud SaaS services have direct access to the data backups.  In this way, the cloud SaaS backup data is protected from access by ransomware.

Cloud-to-Cloud backups with SpinBackup

A cloud-to-cloud backup solution provides the ultimate protection for your Microsoft Office 365 SaaS environment.  However, not all cloud-to-cloud backup solutions are created equal.  SpinBackup provides a fully-featured, capable, cloud SaaS backup solution that allows businesses to protect their valuable business-critical data stored in Microsoft Office 365.

SpinBackup is a core component of the SpinOne solution that includes both backups and cybersecurity features for your Microsoft Office 365 environment.  SpinBackup provides the following features as part of the solution:

• Automatic, versioned backups
• Configurable 1-3x daily
• SpinBackup O365 restore features granular recovery
• Provides the ability to migrate data between user accounts
• Covers the core services of Microsoft Office 365 – Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, Calendar, Contacts
• Top-level encryption for data in-flight and at-rest
• Unlimited storage

SpinBackup provides a solution for enterprise organizations and small businesses alike.  SpinOne provides world-class ransomware protection for your Microsoft Office 365 environment.  It provides a fully automated ransomware response that automatically stops the malicious ransomware process and restores any files affected, all without administrator interaction.

To learn more about how the SpinBackup cloud-to-cloud backup solution can protect your Microsoft Office 365 environment, click here.