Does your Company Backup your Email?

Can they recover a single email message or mailbox?

10-15 years ago, when EVERYTHING related to Information Technology lived within the walls of a company’s office(s), most of the critical systems were backed up.  Even when companies wanted to skimp out, email was always treated with care and was backed up.  The most basic of email backups would allow an administrator to recover a single mailbox and the more granular approaches would allow a single message to be recovered.

As the years have passed the technology has evolved and so has the way a large portion of the industry approaches backing up their critical systems. As cloud computing has become more prominent and companies have chosen to move their email to the cloud with the likes of Office 365 or Google Apps, most companies are not backing up their email in a way that would allow them to recover in a comparable manner to the way it was done years ago which is not a good thing.

Many people assume that when they make the move to the cloud all their data is backed up in the same fashion as they would have done it on-premise. If we look specifically at Microsoft’s Office 365 for a moment, Microsoft is only able to restore a deleted mailbox for 30 days. If you realize at day 31 you need data from that mailbox and do not have it backed using a 3^rd party backup solution, you are out of luck.   If you wanted to restore a single message that your CEO deleted yesterday, you are out of luck. At the end of the day, Microsoft can only help you with the biggest of issues which would have to be caused by a failure of the Office 365 infrastructure.

The good news is that most of the mainstream email cloud providers have highly redundant systems which allow for greater uptime that could have been achieved with the on-premise systems of the past.  The other good news is there are solutions available that allow companies to have the same level email backups in the cloud as they did years ago on-premise. Thrive has multiple solutions which can backup email and other 3^rd party SaaS solutions, contact Thrive to learn more.