While the rapid surge in the popularity of Microsoft Office 365 has fueled a dramatic shift in the corporate IT landscape, freeing technology teams from the burdens of managing their own Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Lync infrastructure, the native capabilities that come with the Office 365 suite should not be mistaken as a replacement for an enterprise backup solution.
When you implement a cloud solution like Office 365 within your enterprise, you are taking a powerful step towards enhanced productivity, efficiency, and accessibility. It is essential to note, however, that no offering – Office 365 or otherwise – can be all things to all customers. For instance, even though Office 365 comes in a variety of packages with different capabilities and at a wide range of price points, decision-makers must remember that the offering is intended to serve the specific needs of a large, enterprise audience. The core capabilities of Office 365, while powerful, are not necessarily built to be a comprehensive solution for companies' data availability and governance requirements.
In fact, this is why Gartner Research strongly recommends organizations deployed on Office 365 use third-party offerings to address gaps in its native capabilities. These third-party features include those that fill these gaps for legal hold management, eDiscovery, DLP, ransomware recovery, advanced threat protection, encryption, and business continuity. While Office 365 includes a number of these capabilities, the platform cannot be all things to all organizations, so it contains some deficiencies that purpose-built, third-party offerings can more adequately address. Often times, these capabilities come with a better price-point than Microsoft can offer.
Office 365 includes an entire suite of SaaS applications that offer a range of valuable capabilities which organizations rely on every day to help them be more productive in achieving business goals. However, these powerful tools are not the purpose-built products that are needed to address the key concerns of availability and data governance. As a result, an increasing number of organizations have taken action to address the gaps in end user data protection, data recovery, legal hold and eDiscovery, as well as the third-party management of Office 365 archival data.
The chart below helps provide a clear picture of why having a third-party data protection and governance offering, in conjunction with Office 365, is critical, and provides a major benefit (capabilities and price-point) to any organization.
Many IT organizations are moving to Office 365 to optimize cost, time, and resources. But to ensure the security of your cloud data, it is imperative to have a proper third-party backup solution in addition to what is natively offered by Microsoft. Druva helps some of the world's largest organizations protect their investment in Microsoft Office 365 from data loss and compliance violations. Druva's industry-leading solutions give users a single pane of glass to monitor and protect data no matter where it resides.
To learn more about how Druva can be a part of your cloud strategy, check out the white paper, Office 365: The Critical Gaps – Addressing the Missing Layers of Data Protection.