IDC Perspective – Why a Backup Strategy for Microsoft Office 365 is Essential

Why a Backup Strategy for Microsoft Office 365 is Essential for Security, Compliance, and Business Continuity

In the era of digital transformation, cloud — particularly SaaS — is considered as a breath of fresh air around the user interface. It offers easier collaboration and is considered as transformative.

IDC research finds that email and collaboration is the most mature business process within SaaS, and it is the most adopted at 61%. As one of the most popular SaaS products, Microsoft Office 365 adoption is accelerating, and its use is expanding beyond Exchange to more services including SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams. While O365 is fast becoming the center of business productivity, a backup and recovery strategy is just an afterthought. 6 in 10 users of O365 IDC spoke with at an event do not have a data protection plan for their O365 estates or rely on Microsoft's native capabilities. In conversations with O365 users, IDC observes that many users confuse Microsoft's availability SLAs to backup strategies, while others don't see the need to think of backup for cloud because it is “different” technology.