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The threats to your Office 365 data

Written by Melanie Magier, Marketing manager at Quadbridge.

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Protecting your Office 365 data matters.

Let’s pause for a moment – imagine your job without email. Not without the ability to send emails, but without your contacts, your mailboxes, your conversation history, and your email attachments. On top of email, imagine loosing the rest of the Office suite data you rely on – your notes, spreadsheets, documents, presentations, etc.  It’s almost impossible to overvalue the role that email and the Office suite data plays in your business and your employees day-to-day. But imagine if all of your data was suddenly gone…

It’s all on you.

You may be thinking “Doesn’t Microsoft take care of Office 365 backups I don’t have to worry about that?” It’s important to remember that SaaS platform providers, like Microsoft Office 365, take on the responsibility of application uptime and the underlying infrastructure. But it is the customer’s responsibility to manage and protect their vital business data.

Top three threats to your Office 365 data:

(1) Ransomware

‍It’s hard to not feel uncomfortable just reading the word: ransomware. If you haven’t heard of it or encountered it, you’re lucky. Ransomware is a type of malicious program that infects one or more of your devices and inhibits your ability to access your data. Once infected, the attacker who deployed the program demands a ransom to return your access to your data. Sadly, paying the ransom is usually the only possible course of action. Ransomware has tremendous effects on productivity (especially while your business has no access to its data), company reputation, and even your IT equipment – which can be rendered useless by the attacker. While the ideal solution would be to avoid ransomware attacks altogether, the reality is that these threats are constantly evolving and are becoming increasingly common. The bottom-line, every business should be prepared to overcome a ransomware attack. To avoid starting from square one, you need to have a reliable backup of your data.

(2) Accidents

If you have kids, you know it all too well. But even in the office, we need to be prepared for the “oops” moments. Between accidental deletions, file corruption, and sending sensitive information to the wrong recipients, mistakes happen. While Office 365 does provide tremendous help by backing up things like inbox folder data and deleted files, their backups have a short lifespan and will be lost forever if they aren’t noticed and addressed quickly. To protect against human fallibility, you need to have a reliable backup of your data.

(3) Threats within

Employees are human. While we’re susceptible to mistakes, we’re also capable of being very harmful. Malicious intent in employees can be unexpected and difficult to protect against because employees have inside access. Therefore, it’s important to be able to limit the possible damage of employee misdeeds. To combat unexpected infiltration, you need to have a reliable backup of your data.

So now what?

The threats to your Office 365 are real, they are unavoidable, but they can be mitigated. Make sure you’re treating your Office365 data like the rest of your data, and that you’re treating all of your data as precious by having an effective backup solution.

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