Microsoft 365 Secure Backup

Office 365 backs up data on a regular basis as part of a commitment to data protection activities that generally support disaster recovery situations and keep your data accessible in accordance to their uptime SLA (99.9%). However, your organization remains ultimately responsible for your data protection as these backups are not available to administrators or end users and are not intended for aiding in the quick and easy restoration of lost data. While it is possible to recover lost data via Office 365’s backups, the process will often prove tedious, costly, and detrimental to business continuity.

The different applications in the Microsoft 365 suite have different data retention periods:
- Inbox or folder data is stored In Microsoft 365 for two years before it’s archived
- Deleted items in the Recycle Bin are stored for one month before they’re permanently deleted
- Deleted SharePoint Online and OneDrive sites and items are stored in the 1st Stage Recycle Bin for one month, the 2nd Stage Recycle Bin for up to three months, and are then permanently deleted
- When an employee leaves the company, their data is stored in Microsoft 365 for one month before being permanently deleted

Archiving users is easy to do from within the platform, and you will not face any charges for these archived backups, provided that you follow the Microsoft off-boarding advice – remove the license and change mailbox to shared. If you just remove the mailbox from the tenant, then it will be archived, but it will still be in a licensed status so will be charged for.

Yes, if a user is deleted, intentionally or unintentionally, their account can be recovered to data of the last backup. Through these backups, you can restore an entire Exchange mailbox, SharePoint or OneDrive site, or a set of Teams/Groups.

Almost half of organizations affected by ransomware in the past year didn’t have immutable backups in place for their compromised systems. This can greatly impact the time it takes to recover and resume normal business operations after an attack. Despite this, Microsoft doesn’t provide native backup for Microsoft 365; the default data retention settings only protect data for an average of 30 to 90 days. This means that, if your Microsoft 365 data is compromised, you’re unlikely to be able to restore all the data that has been lost.

As a backup solution, CloudAlly will capture point-in-time copies of your data and write those copies out to a secure, secondary storage location. This means that, in the event of malicious or accidental data loss, you can safely restore lost or encrypted data to a version that was saved before the breach.

Subscription to the CloudAlly service begins at $30 per user per year and will automatically back up your mail, calendar, contacts, tasks, and drive. For enterprise organizations looking to secure over 1,000 users, or who have a particularly large quantity of data to backup, contact us for a custom quote.

All entities within the entire Microsoft tenant that are assigned a Microsoft 365 License granting functionality for either Exchange, Teams, SharePoint or OneDrive, regardless of their active use, are subject to CloudAlly licensing. The highest usage amount of the month will be reported and charged. This means any object in the Microsoft tenant without an assigned Microsoft license, but using a functionality of Exchange, Teams, SharePoint or OneDrive, will be free of charge.

Shared mailboxes, resource mailboxes, distribution lists and other entities will be free of charge when no Microsoft license is assigned; this also applies to stored backup data where no Microsoft license is applied, even if it is being actively backed up.

Yes. If you want to experience how CloudAlly will practically help your organization, contact us to begin a 14-day free trial. In this time, you will be able to see the benefits of installing the solution.

If you change your Office 365 Admin password, you can also change it on our Backup Task Settings page.

Yes! CloudAlly can backup on-premise MS Exchange.

On-Prem Exchange Procedures

1. The on-premise servers need to be accessible via the internet and Exchange Web Services (EWS) API must be enabled.
2. We need to know the Exchange Version that your client is running and the Exchange Server endpoint.
3. You can then Activate a CloudAlly trial account and send support@constantedge.com the email ID used in the account. No need to activate any backups yet.
4. Send us the Admin ID that you will use to activate backups. No need to provide password. The Admin account needs to have Impersonation in order for this to work.
5. We will create a backup task.
6. You can then click on “edit” next to the newly created backup task in your CloudAlly account and enter the Admin credentials.
7.  At that point you can activate your individual user backups as needed.

Support to backup MS Dynamics will be available in Q4 2023.

CloudAlly are ISO 27001 certified (https://www.iso.org/standard/27001). This ensures there is a high level of security and audit procedures in place including pen testing, security procedure, audit controls, etc. We can supply a copy of the ISO certification on request.

CloudAlly is GDPR and HIPAA compliant. The CloudAlly DPA specifically addresses CloudAlly GDPR & PII handling.

You can find more information about CloudAlly security at https://assets-global.website-files.com/6192d00bee4334aae1d1ab97/63ee2e34cff3088cb12f959f_Security%20Overview%20ConstantEdge.pdf

Yes - the admin can exclude mailboxes from backup.

For employees that leave:

- You can manually delete the backup as part of the offboarding process
- You can set an auto archive retention limit in Settings, e.g. you could configure CloudAlly to delete auto archived mailboxes after 30 days (you can manage this exact time period).

CloudAlly supports the GDPR Right to Erasure.  If a person requests that we remove their data, the company will need to search and identify all related data and submit a request to our support team. CloudAlly will then delete that data from the backups and provide a confirmation of delete.

Yes - we also offer a “Bring Your Own Storage” (BYOS) option on request. This allows you to backup sensitive data in your own AWS S3 buckets, S3 compatible storage service, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform. Please contact support@constantedge.com for more information.

You can find CloudAlly resources, datasheets and product brochures here: https://www.constantedge.com/products/cloudally-product/cloudally-resources