When looking to back up Office 365, you have two primary options, and they are fundamentally different. One is to purchase software, pair it with a storage of your choice (on-prem or cloud) and manage backups/restores yourself just like you would VMs, physical servers, cloud workloads, etc. Or you can purchase an Office 365 backup service that includes the backup software, storage, and possibly even the management of backups/restores. For the purpose of this discussion, let’s call option 1 “traditional” and option 2 “BaaS.”
As you evaluate Office 365 Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) vendors, you may notice a few similarities in how they describe their solutions – “easy deployments” and “cost efficient” are buzzwords commonly used. However, before you decide to utilize a BaaS vendor, you need to be aware of a few pitfalls. Veeam’s foundational approach to Office 365 backup has 5 clear advantages over most BaaS vendors in the market, and they are reasons why our customers love Veeam. Let’s take a close look.
1. Infrastructure freedom
Organizations typically change their infrastructure every few years, whether it’s a strategic decision or one based on pricing. These changes can be unpredictable, so making sure you have an infrastructure-agnostic solution is critical to changing infrastructure whenever you need to.
BaaS vendors can seem like easy solutions but that’s because of their lack of options. Many BaaS vendors force you into their own infrastructure, however, there are a few troubling impacts that can happen because of this. The first is that customers typically don’t have the option to choose the exact infrastructure that fits their needs, but must use the only cloud used by the vendor. Additionally, once a cloud and repository are selected, customers cannot change their infrastructure. In addition, some BaaS vendors make it very difficult to leave them, as they don’t offer a simple way to migrate the customer’s own data out of their cloud. The problem with vendor lock-in is that you don’t realize you suffer from it until you need to use a different storage or switch backup vendors. It can be a painful and expensive experience to extract your data from a BaaS backup vendor.
Veeam provides you with access and control over your Office 365 data. We protect your organization’s investment in backup from any planned or unplanned infrastructure change. From the very start, Veeam has been a storage-agnostic backup vendor. We don’t have our own cloud or local storage offering, instead we allow you to freely choose any infrastructure and location you want on premises or in the cloud. You can also switch platforms in a few steps. For instance, moving from on premises to the cloud, between clouds or changing backup storage locations. Finally, customers can exit their Veeam backup solution without losing their backup data or their recovery capabilities. With Veeam, you can retain your backup and perform recoveries, even after your subscription has expired.
2. Backup control
In a world where achieving RTOs and RPOs can make or break a business and its reputation, it is essential that you’re able to back up as often as you need, so you can recover exactly what you want, when you want. Although, one overlooked fact is that not all data is equal to your business, so you should be able to deliver different levels of backup to different users depending on the value of their data. Some departments require a lower RPO than other departments, for instance, a department may require an RPO of 4 hours for their Office 365 data, while another department may only require an RPO of 12 hours. Moreover, you may need to deliver a low RPO for your critical data sets.
When it comes to BaaS vendors, customers rarely have control over the backup scheduling, which prevents organizations from delivering the right level of protection to their different users. BaaS vendors typically deliver the same RPO to all protected users. Moreover, BaaS vendors typically cannot match the RPO needed by critical users, as they back up data as often as every 6 hours at best (typically once a day).
With Veeam, you can deliver the right level of protection to each user according to the business value of their data. We enable you to offer multiple levels of protection by having multiple policies with different RPOs for your Office 365 organizations. Veeam is also able to deliver the lowest RPO in the industry, backing up as often as every 5 minutes, meeting the RPO that your critical users need.
3. Recovery flexibility
You cannot predict what data you’re going to lose in Office 365 and how you’re going to need to recover it. In order to prepare for the unpredictable, you need to make sure you have all the tools in your toolset for any data loss situation.
BaaS vendors have a limited ability to minimize downtime after data loss, as data may not be recoverable exactly as needed by your organization. Because of their limited set of recovery options, you may not be able to restore data to the desired location in Office 365. BaaS vendors also typically do not allow you to restore data out of Office 365, so if you’re not able to access your Office 365, it would prevent you from restoring the data. Several BaaS vendors offer download or export options, but they are not scalable.
With Veeam, you can minimize downtime by restoring the data exactly how you need to no matter the issue. This is made possible because Veeam offers the broadest set of recovery options in the industry: 40+ recovery options! Veeam can recover to any location in Office 365, recover data out of Office 365 back to on premises, and even provides a variety of save, send and export options available. Thanks to our automated restore options, Veeam makes it easy to restore Office 365 data – in only a few clicks!
4. Scalable recovery
As organizations generate larger amounts of data, it’s important that they understand the increased complexity involved in their search and recovery efforts. Ensuring you have a scalable search and recovery solution in place will help you search across your entire large-scale environment and quickly recover large amounts of data all at once with minimal effort.
Many BaaS vendors provide limited search options, with few filters to select from and no ability to use multiple filters concurrently. They also typically only allow search within a single user and not across users, thus increasing search time and manual work. When it comes to recovery, you typically have to recover the users one-by-one in separate jobs. All of this requires much more manual work.
Veeam makes it easy to find and restore specific items in large amounts of backup data and provide quick recovery from a large data loss situation with minimal manual effort. With Veeam, you can easily find specific items buried in large sets of backup data thanks to an extensive list of search filters that you can combine to finetune your searches. Additionally, Veeam quickly searches large sets of backup data by running a central search across all users. Veeam also enables Administrators to effortlessly restore data from multiple Exchange Online users, OneDrive users, or Teams in a single operation, instead of manually recovering users one-by-one in separate restore jobs. Thus, minimizing downtime.
5. Reliable vendor
Organizations today have a growing number of workloads. Consolidating all your workloads under the protection of one backup vendor can make things easier to manage, especially if that backup vendor is the market leader, with a simple solution and responsive, capable support staff.
Few BaaS vendors offer protection for workloads beyond SaaS applications, but typically require third-party tools to do so, which creates a layer of unnecessary complexity. BaaS backup vendors also typically operate on a lean staff with few user resources and services available for customers.
With Veeam, you can simplify data protection by protecting all your workloads – physical, virtual and cloud-based with a single platform. You also get the added benefit of unmatched customer service, thanks to a team of 4,500 backup experts. In addition, Veeam offers a variety of user resources to help our customers (i.e. webinars, how-to videos, technical documentation, user forums).
Takeaways
There are some clear disadvantages using BaaS vendors. Veeam can provide you with infrastructure freedom, backup control, flexible and scalable recovery, and serve as a reliable vendor for your entire environment.
But don’t take our word for it, our customers say, “It just works.” Read completely raw and unfiltered reviews of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 on TrustRadius and G2 Crowd.
But what if you don’t want to manage this yourself? Veeam has a large ecosystem of managed service providers that can deliver upon the benefits mentioned while offering the simplicity of an “as a service” offering. Click here to find a service provider in your area.
Additional information:
- Still not convinced you need an Office 365 backup? Read about the Office 365 Shared Responsibility Model
- Here is a summary of how Veeam differentiates from Office 365 BaaS vendors
- Download a 30-day FREE trial of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365
- Join a technical demo by a Veeam Systems Engineer
