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Office 365 Exchange Backup Procedures and Third-Party Backup with CloudAlly’s Office 365 Exchange Backup

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Office 365 Exchange Backup Procedures and Third-Party Backup with CloudAlly’s Office 365 Exchange Backup

O365 Exchange BackupOffice 365 Exchange Online is an immensely effective app, but it has one significant issue. While Office 365 offers a few limited built-in and one-time recovery options for Exchange Online, the app does not have a workable backup feature that lets you recover emails after they have been deleted for over 30 days. Never fear, though. You can safely operate Exchange Online if you use it in tandem with CloudAlly’s Office 365 Exchange Backup.

Read on for more information about Office 365 Online’s backup issues, Microsoft’s built-in solutions for a few of these issues, and CloudAlly’s Office 365 Exchange Backup.

Limited Backup in Exchange Online

One of the major drawbacks of Exchange Online is that its mailboxes are not backed up in the Office 365 infrastructure. Microsoft does offer DAG technologies in two datacenters that provide a reseed/repair process if your data fails. But this is not enough. Data can be lost in multiple ways, which is why having multiple backup options is so important. Here are a few common ways emails can be lost:

  • Human error
  • Malicious activity
  • Malware, spyware, or ransomware
  • Incomplete data recovery systems
  • Data corruption

Despite protests from Exchange administrators, Microsoft seems intent on sticking to its gun in not supporting Exchange Online mailboxes being backed up within the Office 365 infrastructure. Still, many administrators have lost essential information from databases that were improperly or infrequently backed up. Microsoft isn’t going to solve the problem or protect your data; so, what can you do to ensure that your company’s data is secure?

Microsoft’s Suggestions for Restoring Email in Office 365 Exchange

Microsoft has a few built-in recovery options in Exchange Online. Some are standard features, while others require you to modify the system settings yourself.

Single item recovery

You can restore a single missing item in Exchange Online without restoring an entire mailbox database. If the Managed Folder Assistant processes a Recoverable Items folder for a mailbox with only one item recovery, that item will not be purged in the Purges subfolder if its retention period (by default, deleted emails are stored for 14 days) has not already passed.

Deleted item retention

Office 365 Exchange lets you restore deleted emails for up to 14 days. But you can also tweak the settings to recover email that has been deleted for up to 30 days. Here’s how to do it.

  1. Connect to Exchange Online’s PowerShell. To do this, enter the command $UserCredential = Get-Credential in the Windows PowerShell Credential Request dialog box. Click “OK.”
  2. Next, run the following command: $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection in the dialog box. Click “OK.”
  3. Next, run the following command ConnectionUrivalue (https://partner.outlook.cn/PowerShell).
  4. Finally, Run the following command: Import-PSSession $Session. You should now be connected to PowerShell.

5. You can choose to change only single users’ retention length. Say you are changing the retention length of a single user’s email. In this case, the user’s name is John Smith. Run the following command in the Exchange Management Shell: Set-Mailbox -Identity “John Smith” -RetainDeletedItemsFor 30 6. You can also change every user in your organization’s retention length by using the following command: Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited -Filter {(RecipientTypeDetails -eq ‘UserMailbox’)} | Set-Mailbox -RetainDeletedItemsFor 30

Placing a mailbox on litigation hold

A litigation hold solution helps you recover email that has been in deleted items longer than 30 days. It is meant to be used as a one-off recovery solution, not one that is sustainable or very often usable. A litigation hold recovers all versions of a deleted email; you can also set a specific hold length. Here are the steps for a litigation hold in Exchange Online:

  1. Enter PowerShell as described in Steps 1 through 4 above.
  2. Navigate to “Recipients” and “Mailboxes.”
  3. Choose the user mailbox that you want to put on litigation hold, and click “Edit.”
  4. Click “Mailbox features” on the mailbox properties page.
  5. Find “Litigation hold: Disabled” and click “Enable.”
  6. You can then specify several features of your litigation hold, including “Litigation hold duration (days),” “Note” (which lets you notify a user that his or her mailbox is on litigation hold), and “URL” (to provide users more information about litigation holds).
  7. Click “Save” on the litigation hold and again on the mailbox properties page.

Reasons Microsoft’s Backup Solutions Fall Short – “Cover Your Bases”

While Microsoft’s built-in solutions provide remedies to some issues with Exchange Online’s backup and recovery issues, these options are extremely limited and only solve a small number of problems that could arise. CloudAlly’s Office 365 Exchange Backup provides a complete and simple backup option. Instead of Microsoft’s limiting 30-day recovery time, Exchange that provides you with unlimited data storage and retention.

CloudAlly’s Office 365 Exchange Backup gives you piece of mind in backing up Exchange Online. But since there are so many ways that emails can be lost, it makes good sense to use as many backup options as possible. While Microsoft offers built-in backup options for Exchange Online, all these solutions are less complete than CloudAlly’s Exchange Backup. For complete safety, you may want to consider implementing Microsoft’s suggested backups and CloudAlly’s Exchange Backup when integrating Exchange Online into your company’s workflow.

Our Backup ensures that your Office 365 Exchange will be secured and recoverable, no matter what happens to your emails. In addition to email, Office 365 Exchange Backup backs up your contacts, calendar, and tasks so that even if something happens to this information, you’ll be able to retrieve it – and you can easily set up backup support for all your users. Exchange Backup automatically discovers new users, or lets you add new employees to the Backup manually.

Office 365 Exchange Backup backs up your data in two ways. The first backs up data so you can find emails lost at a certain time. From there, you can search for your missing email on a precise, specific level. The second backup allows you to export your Office 365 emails to be stored locally.

Ready to see what security feels like? Try our Office 365 Backup for free for 15 days.

Office 365: Threat Intelligence and Data Governance Tools

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Microsoft Office 365: Threat Intelligence and Data Governance Tools

Threat Intelligence and Data Governance ToolsThere is a lot that’s new about Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud version of its traditional desktop software. Some of the biggest new benefits have to do with two major pillars of an enterprise strategy: first, identifying and mitigating threats in a network, and second, establishing policies and procedures for data governance. Threat Intelligence and Data Governance Tools, are significant to our work process in Microsoft Office 365.

 

Why do companies need good data governance and threat intelligence systems in place?

Lots of experts are looking at studies by Ponemon, one of which estimates the average cost of a data breach at around $4 million — there is also this article from writer Michael Panciroli in April that sites some troubling statistics, for example, an assertion that 45% of surveyed companies don’t have good enough data governance to protect them from serious legal and security risks.

That kind of gap is what these new cloud features of Office 365 are meant to address — to help client companies to get more effective cybersecurity in place, perform better advanced data governance, and know more about their business data assets.

Major Benefits of Microsoft Office 365 Threat Intelligence

There is a ton of functionality built into Microsoft Office 365 Threat Intelligence that’s related to foiling hackers, conquering malware, and generally keeping a network safe and clean.

One essential element is the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph — this new feature of Microsoft’s cloud security platform does two major things. One is that it’s a comprehensive data aggregation center that takes in diverse input from hundreds of different sources, along with many of the 350 billion authentications that Microsoft manages each month. The other is that it utilizes machine learning components to increase its threat mitigation power even more. (See more detail on the strengths of Microsoft’s Intelligent Security Graph from Microsoft Vice President of Enterprise Client & Mobility Brad Anderson in this testimonial video.)

In other words, part of the strength of Microsoft Office 365 Threat Intelligence tools is the amount of raw data available to a machine learning system that can work with it and make it into actionable results — for instance, offering real-time tools and alerts, isolating and dealing with content that looks suspicious, and integrating with other security information and event management tools.

Aside from the Intelligent Security Graph, the Office 365 platform also now offers a new Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) reporting interface with all sorts of dashboard views related to network activity. The ability to extend this to desktop clients, and to infiltrate areas of an enterprise network, is very useful to business leaders who need to keep an eagle eye out for disturbing warning signs of inappropriate activity. Maybe it’s a logon from a suspicious location, or activity by an employee that hasn’t been on staff for years. Another major red flag is a significant volume of file deletions, which is another real-time indicator that Microsoft Office 365 Threat Intelligence can analyze.

Relating Microsoft Office 365 Threat Intelligence to Advanced Data Governance

Businesses know that data governance is critically important. Many of them also understand how having access to raw data and tools to filter and refine that data adds to the threat intelligence that they benefit from in-house. But not every business understands how new Microsoft Office 365 tools can enhance data governance in concrete ways. For instance, cloud policy recommendations will help to define data that should be kept and stored in an archive, or data that can safely be discarded. That’s just one aspect of having a security and compliance portal that helps businesses to build and classify their data.

Along with having good data governance and threat intelligence software capabilities, CloudAlly’s Office 365 backup and recovery service is another important part of a fundamental cyber security system. By providing automated daily backups and the ability to restore or export data from any point in time, CloudAlly ensures ongoing business continuity in the event of data loss.

G Suite Vs Office 365

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G Suite vs. Office 365

Businesses are always looking for new ways to help their teams work together while keeping their overhead low. To do this, many administrators choose to use services such as G SuiteVs. Office 365 to gain the word processing, spreadsheet, and power point capabilities while connecting their employees with a way to store and collaborate on files. Let’s look at the two major players, G Suite and Office 365.

Features

Both G Suite and Office 365 offer businesses new methods of productivity. Each has competing features that make them appealing to their key demographic and allow employees to create, store, and share documents and files.

G Suite Features

G Suite was, until end of 2016, formerly known as Google Apps. This program is Google’s answer to the question of how to help businesses with the tools needed for everyday use in addition to offering a space for employees to work together.

To help employees with the tools they need to create files, G Suite includes a variety of applications. All the applications are available online and are accessible from anywhere with the user’s G Suite log in information. These apps include:

  • Docs
  • Sheets
  • Slides
  • Forms

Docs, Sheets, and Slides are the Google equivalent of Office products. Forms is a form creation program that allows employees to create questionnaires and surveys. Google then analyzes them for you quickly.

They also tackled online storage with Google Drive and, to a lesser extent, Google Groups. Groups are not an exact storage area as it is a communication tool. However, the files shared with the group do remain stored there until someone removes them.

To allow employees to work together and communicate, Google offers a wide array of options, all of which G Suite includes. Co-workers talk using

  • Gmail (which comes with a custom domain email @yourcompany)
  • Google Calendar
  • Google+
  • Google Hangouts with Video Chat
  • Google Groups

To help workers keep on track, Google Keep and Google Tasks work as a scrap pad to help workers with their list of things they need to do. Keep allows users to capture and organize ideas. Tasks work as a checklist of what needs completing.

Google Sites is a content management area for data storage and company intranet. Sites are easy-to-build websites. The sites built here allow co-workers to share and collaborate as well.

Office 365 Features

Like G Suite, Office 365 is Microsoft’s answer to the business need for anywhere access. At the core of the service are the popular and familiar applications. Unlike with Google, some of the Office 365 services offer local copies in addition to web-based versions of the applications.

Web and Desktop Apps include:

  • Word
  • Excel
  • PowerPoint
  • Outlook

Desktop apps only:

  • Access
  • Publisher
  • One Note

Each desktop application license covers up to five devices such as tablets, phones, PCs or Macs. It allows employees to load the applications on their mobile devices, work computers, and personal systems used for work purposes.

Office 365 comes with 1TB OneDrive storage per user. Like Google Drive, OneDrive is a place for users can create, edit, download, and share documents and other media.

As for collaboration where users can talk and work together, Office 365 offers a variety of options. Select plans come with a dedicated email with custom domain addresses. However, the straight Business plan does not come with email, but Microsoft does offer free email at Outlook.com

In addition to email, Office offers:

  • Skype for Business for chat and video calling
  • Teams for chat
  • Yammer for chat
  • Exchange for messaging

Select plans include SharePoint which for intranet use to allow employees a central location to work together on projects.

Security (Office 365 Vs G Suite)

When it comes to security, both companies work hard to protect their users. Both try to monitor their servers for weaknesses and offer patches as quickly as they can to holes in their infrastructure. Both providers offer HIPAA compliance to their consumers, with the appropriate paperwork.

G Suite Security

When it comes to security, Google tries to have their users’ best interest in mind. In fact, Google is not only HIPAA compliant but also certified with ISO 27001, ISO 27018, EY Point, and AICPA/SOC. These certifications highlight their dedication to security.

G Suite comes with Spam, phishing, and malware prevention. They also have brand phishing defense as part of their security infrastructure.

On the user-controlled side, administrators can turn on two-step verification which forces users to use an alternate code in addition to their log-in credentials to access their files. Administrators also control the single-point sign on to unify access to other enterprise cloud applications and management of mobile devices.

Additionally, Google offers data loss protection (DLP) to allow administrators to protect proprietary information from being emailed to outside sources. Any messages that contain the information set in the DLP is either blocked from being sent or quarantined. Quarantined emails alert the sender to allow them to remove any sensitive data before sending.

Office 365 Security

Like Google, Microsoft ensures company data is secure. Microsoft uses service-side encryption to protect data both at rest on servers and during transfers between the user’s device and Microsoft’s servers.

When the files are on the servers, Office uses both file-level and volume-level encryption. Multiple types of encryption protect data in transit. This encoding includes Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) and Transport Layer Security (TLS). Microsoft uses third-party auditors to verify their cryptography independently.

Along with TLS and IPsec, Microsoft uses Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) to filter potentially dangerous email messages from company Office 365 inboxes (available on select plans). The protection keeps spam, viruses, and malware out without having to set additional settings.

Additionally, Microsoft offers the same two-factor authentication that Google provides their customers. The authenticating code arrives by text, phone call, or using a mobile application. Clients using two-factor authentication may also need application passwords to use non-browser based clients such as Outlook or Skype for Business.

Plans and Pricing

Both G Suite and Office 365 offer a tiered business system that allows clients to pick the best plan for their company.

G Suite

G Suite has three plans for businesses to choose. All options come with a 15-day free trial.

Plan Name Cost per User per Month
Basic $5
Business $10
Enterprise $25

The Basic Plan includes:

  • Email
  • Video and Voice Conferencing
  • Shared Calendar
  • Docs, Sheets, Slides
  • 24/7 customer support via email, phone, or online
  • Security admin controls
  • 30GB storage

Business Plans include everything from the Basic plan plus:

  • Unlimited Cloud (or 1TB per user if there are fewer than five users)
  • Smart search across G Suite with Cloud Search
  • Archive and set retention policies for email and chats
  • eDiscovery for email, cats, and files
  • Audit reports to track activity

Enterprise Plans include everything from Business and Basic plans plus:

  • Data Loss Prevention for Gmail
  • Data Loss Prevention for Google Drive
  • Hosted S/MIME for Gmail
  • Integrated Gmail with Compliant 3rd Party Archiving tools

Office 365

Office 365 also has a tiered solution for companies to choose. There are three primary plans to accommodate businesses with 300 or fewer employees. Microsoft also offers Enterprise level plans for larger corporations. Business Premium, E3 and E5 Enterprise plans come with a 30-day free trial.

Small Businesses
Plan Name Cost Per User Per Month (Annual) Cost Per User Per Month (monthly)
Business Essential $5.00 $6.00
Business $8.25 $10.00
Business Premium $12.50 $15.00

Business Essential includes:

  • Online web apps of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook
  • 1 TB OneDrive storage per user
  • Skype for Business
  • Exchange
  • SharePoint
  • Teams

Business includes:

  • Online web apps of Word, Excel, PowerPoint
  • Desktop apps of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, and Publisher
  • 1 TB OneDrive storage per user

Business Premium includes everything from the essential plan plus:

  • Desktop apps of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher, and OneNote
Enterprise Level
Plan Name Cost Per User Per Month (annual)
E1 $8.00
Pro Plus $12.00
E3 $20.00
E5 $35.00

E1 includes:

  • Online applications of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook
  • 1TB OneDrive per user
  • Hosted Email 50GB
  • SharePoint
  • Video Conferencing for up to 250 people
  • Skype Meeting broadcast for up to 10,000 people
  • Teams
  • Manual retention/deletion policies
  • Tasks
  • Planner
  • 24/7 web/phone support
  • No limit to number of users

Pro Plus includes:

  • Desktop apps of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, and Publisher
  • Online applications of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook
  • 1TB OneDrive per user
  • 24/7 web/phone support
  • No limit to number of users

E3 includes everything found in the E1 tier plus:

  • Desktop apps of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, Access, and Publisher
  • Unlimited OneDrive Storage
  • Yammer messaging
  • eDiscovery with in-place search, hold, and export
  • Schedule management with StaffHub

E5 includes all E3 benefits plus additional security measures and calling features such as:

  • Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection
  • Custom lock box for mail access control
  • Advanced data governance
  • Organization analytics
  • Phone system with add-on calling plan
  • Audio conferencing with a dial-in phone number.

No matter if you choose to go with G Suite or Office 365 for your business needs, it is crucial that you back up information created and stored in these services. CloudAlly offers continuous backup for all your employees using either G Suite or Office 365.  Both G Suite and Office 365 exchange start at $3 per user per month or $30 per user per year.

Try out our ROI calculator – Figure out the cost of not backing up your data.

How to Recover an Office 365 Account

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How to Recover An Office 365 Account

Recover an Office 365 AccountDeleting accounts is a necessary part of doing business from time to time. Employees leave for other jobs, and you need to get rid of their accounts and close off access. However, even the best intentions can sometimes go awry. An administrator selects the wrong user account and deletes it before realizing the mistake, which is why its necessary to know how to recover an Office 365 Account !

Office 365 offers a way to restore deleted users. However, the restoration only works if you discover the error within 30 days of deletion. If an employee leaves the company, the administrator deletes the account, and then the employee returns after this 30-day period, you must create a new account.

Before beginning, double check the Office 365 license is still available to assign to the account. The following procedures are for business users not using Active Directory for their Office 365 accounts.

Restore Office 365 Accounts in Microsoft.

To begin, an administrator must sign in using administrator credentials. Once logged in, navigate to the Admin center.

  1. In the Admin center, select Users and then Deleted Users.
  2. Once on the Deleted users page, choose the username, or names, to restore.
  3. Select Restore.
  4. Follow On screen prompt to set passwords.
  5. Once restored, click the Send email and close button.

If the account does not restore, there may be a conflict with the username or proxy address. With a proxy address conflict, the restoration should remove the conflicting address and assign a new one to the restored user.

Resolving User Name Conflict

There are a couple of different reasons for a username conflict to occur in Office 365. On reason is that the user you wish to restore still has an active username within the system. To fix this, you must replace the existing account with the restored one by first deleting the active user in the account.

The other reason is a new user has a similar name to the previous user. Therefore the new user’s username is the same as the previous user. To fix this issue, you must assign a new username to the restored account.

To perform the secondary repair, first, log into your Office 365 administrator account. Once logged in, navigate to the Admin Center and begin the restoration process as you in the previous steps. After setting the password and clicking restore, however, you will see a message indicating there was a problem restoring the account.

On the message indicating there was one of the accounts, you may do one of the following,

  • Cancel the restore and rename the active user, then attempt the restoration again.
  • Type a new primary email address for the user and click Restore.

Choose the option that best works for your users. Review the results and then select close.

Other Options

Recovering an Office 365 account may not be to reinstate a user. Instead, you might want to recover the account of a terminated employee due to litigation such as wrongful termination. However, Microsoft deletes the account 30 days after the license has been removed so without a 3rd party backup, that account is gone forever.

CloudAlly allows you to archive employee mailboxes and and retain those archives for as long a your internal retention policy requires. While archived, an administrator can still perform a cross-user restore to legal, HR or auditing for example, or export data in Outlook compatible .pst format for local access. Archives can be retained indefinitely or deleted once you’ve met your internal retention policy requirements.

You can try our free trial solution for 15 days. After your free trial, Office 365 backup support is an affordable $3 per month per user or $30 per year per user.

Office 365 add-Ons

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Office 365 add-Ons

Best Microsoft Office 365 Productivity Add-Ons

In a recent article featured in KitGuru online magazine, the latest Office 365 add-Ons were illustrated with CloudAlly Office 365 Backup Solution topping the chart.

The article titled: Extending 365: 7 Tools to Improve Your Microsoft Office Experience, explicitly pointed out CloudAlly backup as one of the best Office 365 tools.  CloudAlly is again recognized as a leading productivity tool by ‘techies’ who value the simple but yet safe cloud-to-cloud backup solution.

Microsoft’s Office 365 is an incredibly powerful and comprehensive suite on its own, but with add-ons you can supercharge your Office 365 productivity, being able to restore your data from any point in time.

Try out CloudAlly backup solutions for: G Suite, Office 365, Box.com and others.

Free 14 day trial…

Office 365 add-Ons

 

 

How to Secure Office 365

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How to Secure Office 365

Office 365 Exchange Security Best Practices

Using Office 365 is a simple way to get all your employees on the same page. Of course, having a service that is accessible both in the office and on-the-go, means security is an even bigger consideration. How do you ensure your company’s Office 365 service is secure? How to secure Office 365 ?

Microsoft has built-in security tools to help keep unauthorized users out. While most of these features are available to every account holder, it must first be enabled. They are not turned on automatically.

Multi-factor Authentication

All Office 365 accounts use a single log-in to access email and cloud services. This simplistic approach makes it easy for the user; it does make it easy for an outsider to break into multiple accounts. Chances are, once they are in one employee account, the easier it is to get into another employee’s account.

To better protect your accounts, you can turn on multi-factor authentication for each of your employees.  To do so start by signing in to your Office 365 and go to the Office 365 admin center.

  1. Navigate to Users and select Active Users.
  2. In the Admin center select, More and Setup Azure multi-factor auth.
  3. Find the users you want to enable multi-factor authentication. If necessary, change the view at the top to see all your users.
  4. Check the box next to users whom you want multi-factor authentication enabled.
  5. On the right-hand side, select Enable.
  6. In the new dialog box, click enable multi-factor auth.

Now, users can set up two-factor verification.

Two-factor Authentication

After turning on the multi-factor authentication, you must set up the two-factor verification service. This feature requires that you enter an additional code upon signing into browser based accounts. The randomly generated code comes via text message, phone call, secondary email, or through a Microsoft Authenticator app.

Each employee logs into their account to start the process after the multi-factor authentication.

  1. Once logged in, select Set it now.
  2. Choose the authentication method that best suits you and follows the prompts.
  3. Once finished, Micorsoft prompts you for the secondary code the next time you log. You receive the code via the method chosen during setup.

You can choose multiple verification methods, which is recommended, in the event you cannot access your conventional method.

Setting Up App Password

Once the multi-factor authentication is enabled, you can allow your employees to create application passwords for your different apps. If they are using a non-browser application such as Outlook, you must have a particular app password to log in, not your traditional password.

Office 2016 administrators also have the option of setting up a two-factor authentication for their users. When using a two-factor authentication, non-browser applications require individual passcodes.

To set up an app password:

  1. Login to Office 365, you must use both your password and verification code.
  2. Choose to set and then Office 365
  3. Select Security and Privacy, then Additional security verification.
  4. On the Addition Security Verification page, choose “update my phone numbers used for account security.” This option brings up the page with the app password setting.
  5. Select app passwords at the top of the page
  6. Click on create. Microsoft generates a random password.
  7. Copy the password to clipboard; you do not need to memorize or write it down.
  8. Open the application needing the password.
  9. When prompted, paste the passcode into the password box. Make sure you check the “remember my credentials” box before clicking OK.

Once stored, the application saves the app password in memory. Anytime you change your account password you need to regenerate a new app password for each application.

Microsoft offers limited backup support for Office 365 services. While maintaining high-security protocols, such as multi-factor authentication, can help protect files, having a backup service such as CloudAlly in place can ensure you never lose important documents.

View CloudAlly backup for Office 365 Solution Case Study.