Many businesses assume that because their email, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams live in Microsoft 365, Microsoft is backing them up. Microsoft does keep the service running and protects against failures on its side — but protecting your data from deletion, mistakes, and attacks is largely your responsibility. This is often called the shared responsibility model.
What Microsoft protects
Microsoft keeps its infrastructure available and replicated, so a failed disk in a Microsoft data centre will not lose your mailbox. That is resilience, not backup.
What is still on you
- Accidental deletion — deleted items and recycle bins only hold content for a limited time before it is gone for good.
- Ransomware — if a user’s device is infected, synced OneDrive files can be encrypted and the encrypted versions synced to the cloud.
- Departing staff — when a licence is removed, that person’s mailbox and files are deleted after a short grace period unless you act.
- Malicious changes — a compromised account can delete or alter data across the tenant.
What good Microsoft 365 backup looks like
A dedicated backup service copies your mailboxes, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams data to separate storage, on a schedule, with long retention. It lets you restore a single email, a folder, or a whole mailbox to a point in time — independently of Microsoft 365 itself. As with any backup, test restores regularly.
Pair it with the right security settings
Backup is your safety net; prevention matters too. Multi-factor authentication, sensible sharing settings, retention policies, and alerting on suspicious sign-ins all reduce the chance you will need that restore.
We set up and manage Microsoft 365 backup and security for businesses in the US and the Caribbean, so a deleted folder or a compromised account is a quick restore — not a crisis.
Related service: Cloud Computing — System & application hosting and remote cloud access.