Why your Microsoft 365 data needs its own lifebuoy
Because ‘the cloud’ is not the same thing as a safety net.
Every day your organisation generates emails, Teams messages, SharePoint files, Planner tasks and a small mountain of OneDrive content. Microsoft does an excellent job keeping that platform available and resilient, but availability is not the same as having a recoverable copy you control.
When someone deletes a folder by mistake, when a misconfigured app corrupts mailboxes, when ransomware strikes or when a supplier outage wipes out a configuration, your business needs a copy of its data that sits outside the blast radius. That is what backup is for.
The hard facts that should make you act
Here is the reality facing UK organisations.
According to the UK Government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025, 43% of UK businesses reported at least one cyber breach or attack in the past year. Human error remains one of the most common contributing factors across incidents. Mistakes create real operational risk, and recovery is only as strong as the last verified backup.
The same survey shows the average cost of a disruptive incident sits in the low thousands for UK businesses. That might sound modest, but it does not include wider impacts such as lost productivity, legal exposure or reputational damage. For smaller organisations, even a single incident can be materially painful.
These are not edge cases. They are regular, real events that affect UK organisations every week.
Microsoft 365 is a great platform with different rules
Microsoft’s commitments are focused on the resilience of the platform rather than the recoverability of your business data. Their service level agreements are about uptime. They replicate your data across regions to protect against hardware or service failures. That protects Microsoft 365 as a service, not your ability to restore a mailbox from last Tuesday.
In Microsoft’s shared responsibility model, Microsoft manages infrastructure availability. You manage your data, your access controls and your recovery. Retention settings and features such as Litigation Hold are helpful, but they are not the same thing as a dedicated backup strategy that gives you control over point in time restores.
What organisations actually lose and why backups matter
Backup is not an abstract concept. It solves real problems.
Accidental deletions. People make mistakes and sometimes those mistakes are not spotted until weeks later. A backup lets you rewind to a known good state.
Ransomware and availability attacks. When attackers encrypt or corrupt your Microsoft 365 environment, the only safe route back is a clean, isolated copy of your data. Without that, recovery becomes slow, uncertain or impossible.
Compliance and legal holds. Retention settings help, but many organisations need longer retention windows, immutable copies or strict separation of duties. That level of assurance normally requires a dedicated backup.
What good Microsoft 365 backup looks like
A strong backup approach will include:
Coverage beyond mail. Backup should include Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams including chat and files and any relevant configuration elements. Email is only one part of the picture.
Point in time and granular restores. You should be able to recover a single file, a mailbox folder or an entire site collection to the exact moment you choose.
Immutable and isolated storage. Backups should be stored separately from your production tenant and protected from tampering. This reduces the risk of attackers wiping both production and backup data.
Retention aligned to policy. Your recovery and retention strategy should reflect your legal, regulatory and business needs, not just the defaults provided by the platform.
Regular restore drills. A backup is only as good as the last successful restore. Testing restores monthly or at least quarterly is a practical, confidence building exercise.
Least privilege and clear logging. Protect backup access with multi factor authentication, role separation and strong audit trails so malicious actors cannot quietly remove your safety net.
Inbuilt ransomware detection and scanning. A modern backup platform should not just store data, but actively monitor it. Inbuilt ransomware detection and malware scanning help identify suspicious encryption activity or malicious files as backups are taken or restored. This provides early warning of an attack and prevents infected data from being reintroduced during recovery.
Solutions that include behaviour-based detection and clean restore points significantly reduce recovery risk and shorten incident response time.
Common pushbacks and the straight answers
“Microsoft keeps everything anyway.”
Not in the way many people believe. Microsoft protects platform availability. You remain responsible for recovering your data when something goes wrong.
“Backups are expensive.”
The real cost sits in downtime, rebuild work, regulatory exposure and reputational harm. Compared with those outcomes, a measured backup programme is cost effective.
“We have retention policies.”
Retention and backup do different jobs. Retention governs what stays in the live platform. Backup lets you restore previous states or deleted content when retention settings are not enough.
Two quick starter moves to complete this week
Map your critical data. Identify the SharePoint sites, mailboxes, Teams channels and OneDrive stores that would create serious business impact if unavailable for 24 to 72 hours. Start with these.
Verify a restore end to end. Select a mailbox or site, restore it into a test space and document the steps and timing. This provides clarity and shows where improvements are needed.
Final word. Treat backup as governance, not insurance
Backing up Microsoft 365 is not a tick box exercise. It is a part of good governance. It is the difference between telling a story about an outage and calmly reporting that you restored from a known good point and resumed operations the same day.
Your cloud provider gives you a resilient platform. The responsibility to keep your data recoverable, compliant and under your control sits with you. Plan for human error. Plan for attackers. And plan to demonstrate you can recover when you need to.