Many small business owners breathe a sigh of relief once they move their email, documents, or applications to the cloud. It feels like someone else is finally in charge of the heavy lifting: fewer in-house servers, less hardware to maintain, fewer headaches.
It’s a smart move in many ways. Cloud platforms like Microsoft 365, Dropbox, and others offer convenience, flexibility, and a degree of built-in protection that’s far beyond what most businesses could manage on their own.
But there’s a blind spot most people don’t realize until it’s too late: cloud providers don’t back up your data the way you think they do.
Don’t they have it handled?
When you store files or emails in the cloud, it’s easy to assume those providers are keeping everything perfectly safe. And to be fair, they are – from their side. If their servers crash or there’s a natural disaster, they can recover your data because they run redundant systems and have their own internal backups.
A common assumption is that if you’re using Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), your data is automatically backed up and protected. After all, it’s in the cloud, right?
Yes – but not in the way you might think.
Microsoft does offer some redundancy and short-term retention, but they’re not in the business of providing long-term, restorable backups for your business. In their own documentation, they recommend using third-party tools for that.
Here’s what’s at risk if you don’t have your own backup:
- Emails permanently deleted (even by accident) are unrecoverable after a short time.
- OneDrive and SharePoint files overwritten or removed may be gone forever.
- If an employee leaves and you close their account, so goes all their data.
- Ransomware or internal sabotage can lock or destroy cloud data just like local data.
Without a true backup solution, you’re one mistake – or one bad day – away from losing information your business depends on.
A smarter solution: Managed cloud backup for Office 365
The right approach is to use a managed backup platform designed specifically for Microsoft 365, delivered and maintained by your IT partner (that’s us).
This kind of backup works in the background, quietly capturing all your email, inboxes, folders, and attachments; contacts, calendars, and shared mailboxes; OneDrive and SharePoint files; and, Microsoft Teams conversations and shared files.
Cloud backup solutions are fully automated – no one on your team needs to click a button or remember to save anything. Backups run automatically, several times per day.
You can keep data for as long as your business needs it – 90 days, one year, or forever. Not just Microsoft’s very short default window.
Need a file or email as it existed last Tuesday at 3 p.m.? This is called “point in time recovery.” We can restore it exactly as it was, instantly.
Even if an employee is terminated, leaves the company, or an account is deactivated, their data is still backed up and recoverable. Once an account is deleted in Microsoft 365, you only have a short amount of time to recover the data.
And the best part? We manage it for you. We monitor it daily, fix problems before they become issues, and make sure your critical cloud data is always protected.
Peace of mind without lifting a finger
Small businesses are moving more and more of their operations to the cloud – which makes protecting that cloud data more important than ever. Just because it’s stored online doesn’t mean it’s safe from deletion, cyberattacks, or even billing errors that can deactivate accounts.
When you work with Tech Experts, we handle the whole backup process for you. You don’t have to buy software, assign someone to monitor it, or wonder whether you’ll be able to get a deleted file back. It’s covered – securely, automatically, and professionally.
If you’d like to make sure your Microsoft 365 data is being backed up the right way – or if you’re not sure at all – let’s talk. We’ll review your current setup and show you how we can protect your cloud data before it becomes a problem.
