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Arcserve Southern Africa has announced the availability of Arcserve’s UDP for the SA market, aimed at the protection of Microsoft 365 (MS 365).
According to Byron Horn-Botha, lead: channel and partnership, Arcserve Southern Africa, there is remarkable complacency and incorrect assumptions in the market with regards to the backup and recovery capabilities of MS 365. “Users appear not to understand that they, and not Microsoft, are responsible for the protection and backup of their data from human error, internal and external threats, and programmatic issues.”
Microsoft does provide backup as part of a shared-responsibility model whereby it takes responsibility for the physical security of its data centres and software failures on its part. Horn-Botha says the assumption is that MS 365 items are backed up by Microsoft for long-term retention. “The reality is a different matter. The customer is accountable for the rest of the backup picture.”
MS Office uptake has soared in the time of the pandemic with the company reporting a 15% increase in quarterly sales in April. The product facilitates the work from anywhere, at any time, model. “Organisations are dependent on it for email communication, team collaboration and document retention. These needs have been boosted further by the global pandemic,” says Horn-Botha.
However, he says that while Microsoft does an outstanding job of taking care of the infrastructure for these services, it’s a misconception to think it also takes care of data backup. “Business executives need to ask themselves what the risks are and arm themselves with the information necessary to gain control over their MS 365 data.
“One simple example is where a company finds it needs access to files stored on both OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online from a project that took place years ago, only to discover someone accidentally deleted the folder. This is followed by a desperate search in the recycle bin, again with the grim discovery that the necessary files aren’t there either.”
MS 365 retains files for only 90 days in the recycle bin, he adds. “Moreover, the bin can be emptied at any time, making the data completely unrecoverable. Even when data is retrievable, point-in-time recovery is out of the scope of Microsoft, leaving businesses with no other choice but to recover the latest version available in the recycle bin with all the modifications they may not want. Furthermore, retention policies vary for each application in the cloud platform, making the process of recovering deleted items even more cumbersome.
“Arcserve’s solution is to make MS 365 protection a reality with our Unified Data Protection (UDP) solution. Companies can benefit from the most complete set of data protection capabilities available for MS 365, including complete support for the critical services: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business Deduplication and compression with strong AES encryption.
“Our UDP solution offers flexible storage support and licensing options to fit business needs, plus streamlined, unified management interfaces for an integrated disaster recovery and backup solution; point-in-time backup and granular recovery. Organisations can take control of MS 365 data and protect their data,” concludes Horn-Botha.
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