This article walks through the reasons why Microsoft365 & Google Workspace does not equate to full data protection, then offers tips on how IT professionals can close the gap by deploying data backup and recovery software that supports all their components.
If you asked most IT pros to list the benefits of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions, there’s a good chance many would mention not having to worry about backups. When you use SaaS, they’d say, an added SaaS backup is not required, as the vendor protects your data for you.
We’re here to tell you that that’s a lie – or at least a misconception. While it’s true that SaaS solutions generally offer some degree of built-in data protection, it’s usually very limited. Too often, IT professionals learn the hard way that there is no way to recover data when something goes wrong with a SaaS application or platform, such as accidental data deletion. Even when SaaS solutions claim to offer capabilities like file versioning, there may be no way to recover, unless you have a SaaS backup solution in place.
To explain, this article walks through the reasons why SaaS does not equate to full data protection, then offers tips on how IT professionals can close the gap by deploying a SaaS backup and recovery software that integrates specfically with this SaaS solution.
SaaS backup: Microsoft 365/Google Workspace lacks full data protection
To be sure, major SaaS platforms like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are well-designed, well-managed solutions that offer some minimum level of built-in data protection. But they also fall short in critical respects when it comes to data backup and recovery.
1. Lack of true backup
SaaS vendors like Microsoft and Google offer data protection features such as redundancy, which minimizes the risk that customers of their platforms will lose data due to failures within the vendors’ own infrastructure. This makes their solutions more resilient than most applications that businesses host themselves, which are usually not replicated across multiple data centers or regions.
In addition, SaaS vendors usually offer capabilities like data retention policies. These make it possible to retain data automatically for preset periods, reducing the risk that users will accidentally remove it.
Yet on their own, these capabilities don’t amount to true backup. Complete backup means that you can recover any data, from any point in time. Redundancy and data retention features don’t enable this because they typically only allow recovery of the most recent version of data that has not been deleted.
If you want to recover data that you’ve removed from Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, you’re typically out of luck. Likewise, you often can’t recover an earlier version of a specific file or folder, which is a problem if, for example, someone in your organization has maliciously modified the data and you can’t restore the original, “clean” version.
2. Backup coverage gaps
Even when SaaS software includes built-in data protection features, the features often don’t extend to all of data.
For instance, Microsoft 365 is subject to the following coverage gaps:
- Exchange Online: Some calendar data is not backed up.
- OneDrive: Although OneDrive has built-in data versioning that enables some level of point-in-time recovery, the number of file versions you can store (and therefore recover) is limited.
- Teams: Chats, metadata, tabs and wiki content are often not backed up or restorable.
- SharePoint: SharePoint has a backup feature that nominally lets you create backups of entire sites. But in practice, some folders or files due to problems like permissions limitations that prevent certain data from being reachable during backup creation.
Similarly, Google Workspace has some notable backup gaps:
- Gmail: Mail threads are only partly captured for backup purposes.
- Drive and Shared Drives: Because backup policies for a single Drive can be different from those for Shared Drives, backup operations may be Inconsistent
- Calendar and Contacts: This data is often deprioritized or missing from backups.
The problems with incomplete backup
Given that these platforms rarely go down, you might think that lack of complete backups is not really a big deal. In reality, however, organizations may face a variety of problems stemming from incomplete or inconsistent backup for SaaS platforms, such as:
- Accidental deletion: If an employee accidentally removes a file on a SaaS platform that has not been backed up, the business loses it forever.
- Malicious insiders: As mentioned above, malicious users may purposefully delete data, making it unrecoverable if it was only stored in the SaaS platform.
- Misconfigured retention: Oversights or mistakes in retention policies could mean that data you thought was backed up is not actually safe.
- Slow recovery: Even if your data is protected within a SaaS platform, actually recovering it could take a long time if you need to perform recovery manually.
- Regulatory risks: Regulations like GDPR require adequate backups for certain types of data. The built-in data protections on SaaS platforms may fall short of those mandates.
- Audit and discovery shortcomings: When facing audits or legal discovery, businesses may fail to provide access to relevant data if they lack complete archives of SaaS-based content.
Closing the gap: Implementing a cloud-to cloud backup strategy
To implement SaaS backup strategies that deliver full protection against risks like data loss, business disruption and regulatory failures, businesses need more than the data retention capabilities provided by SaaS solutions themselves.
They must also implement, for starters, fully granular file restore capabilities. This means that any version of any file – emails, chats, documents and so on – can be recovered from any point in time. Granular restore is the only way to protect against risks like malicious file manipulation.
Full backup cover is also an obvious requirement. Organizations must eliminate the gaps that can leave certain types of data, like chats or calendar information, unprotected. Although this information may not “feel” as critical as other types of data, like emails or documents, regulators and auditors tend to take a different view. They want to know that when you say you’ve backed up data, you’ve truly backed up all of the data.
The ability to automate backups, secure backup data with encryption and access controls and align backup operations with varying compliance requirements is equally critical. These capabilities ensure that this data is not just backed up, but that it’s backed up efficiently and securely.
SaaS platforms like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspaces don’t offer all of these capabilities natively. But with the help of cloud-native, policy-driven and cost-effective SaaS backup solution like MSP360 Backup for Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, IT professionals can close the gaps. They can ensure that all of their data is fully protected – and they can do it in a cost-effective, scalable way.
Conclusion: Why “almost everything” backup for M365/Google isn’t good enough
When it comes to data backup and recovery, protecting almost all of your data is not enough. When a data loss even occurs – or when auditors or regulators ask for proof of backup compliance – backup blind spots result in undue business risk.
This is why IT leaders must assess their current backup strategies and assumptions, especially when it comes to backup for SaaS platforms such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. They may find that the critical data their organizations entrust to SaaS platforms is not as protected as they thought – and that they need to extend their SaaS backup for Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace and recovery strategy to achieve true backup and, with it, true resilience.
Further reading
Top 6 Critical Mistakes in Microsoft 365 Data Protection
Linux Patch Management best practices
How to Find Your AWS Access Key ID and Secret Access Key
Amazon EC2 vs Amazon S3: Difference and Use Cases
Microsoft SQL Server Transaction Log Backup
Windows Troubleshooting: Checking and Enabling Recovery Environment
