With remote workers, your Office 365 backup strategy is key

With so many people working from home, there are almost as many processes that have changed as have stayed the same. The company workflow—every single document, note, memo, and hallway conversation—is almost entirely online. It can be challenging to make sure that all of that business data is secured in a protected location.

Data backup is more critical than ever. All of the business communications and company data generated by the new workflow—40 hours a week x as many employees as you have—need to be protected.

How confident are you about your backup? What are your key backup-related concerns?

• Where are your remote workers saving their data? Now that they are out of the office, they may be saving to a local drive or to an unapproved file sync and share application.


• Are your employees using SharePoint and OneDrive more than they used to? How are these additional files being protected?


• What about Exchange and Teams? Are you running backups and archiving your business messaging?


• Are the data backups available and accessible at all times? Are you able to quickly find and recover what you need?

Building a better backup strategy for remote work

It’s important to make sure that employees are saving business data in a backed-up location, not just on their laptops. One way to do this is to create a policy mandating that all business documents be saved on a company-approved shared system such as Microsoft OneDrive and/or SharePoint. That way, even if disaster strikes an individual laptop, there is a copy that can be recovered.

The next step would be to make sure that the company IT team can recover OneDrive and SharePoint content on both a macro and micro level. On a macro level, being able to restore part or all of a SharePoint or OneDrive site can save your IT team hours as well as avoid the inconvenience of not having SharePoint or OneDrive available for an unspecified time. Native Microsoft functionality does not allow for partial restores, which means additional time and complexity involved if there is no third-party backup solution in place. If you’re encouraging people to put documents in a shared space, you are putting more pressure on everything being available, all the time, for everyone.

On a micro level, how easily can IT help your employees find documents that have been lost? How much information does someone need about the document in order to find it? Most of the time, people don’t have the exact name of the file that they lost. They might only know that it was an Excel budget spreadsheet from April or maybe May. Being able to recover these documents quickly can save employees time and keep your business running smoothly.

The number one collaboration and information sharing application is email, so you need to make sure that you are backing up that information. How much time would it take for you to replace your contacts and calendar? How critical are the reports, correspondence, and other documents that are saved only in your email?

Remote work has also pushed those everyday hallway conversations into applications like Microsoft Teams. Online collaboration groups and work teams have been so effective that many organizations have hundreds of groups to facilitate communication. Saving individual chat messages might be overkill, but backing up files from Teams and who is in each Teams group could save a lot of overtime and unneeded stress if you have to restore some project teams that were accidentally deleted.

How Barracuda can help

Barracuda offers data protection solutions to help you with all of these scenarios. One of the recent success stories that we had was NCC Education, which offers business and IT qualifications globally. They did a major overhaul of their email security, backup, and archiving strategy recently. One of their major concerns with their previous solution was that it would take a full week to restore a server and it would require a lot of hands-on time by IT. The customer appreciates that the Barracuda solution allows them to restore a file or email in 5 minutes. This customer also noted that it was important to them that if an employee deleted their SharePoint and OneDrive files, the company would be able to restore those files with one click—remotely.

These are the things that make a backup strategy really work—encouraging people to back up their work to SharePoint/OneDrive, having the backup work remotely, and being able to find and restore what you need quickly.

Protect your organization and limit your frustrations with an easy-to-use Office 365 solution that can be up and running in 5 minutes — Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup.

Link to NCC Story - https://assets.barracuda.com/assets/docs/dms/NCC_Education_A4_1-0-cs.pdf