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MSPs – Boost Office 365 Migration to Cloud Revenue by Including Cloud Backup

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Office 365 migration to cloud, for MSPs

In today’s high-tech marketplace there are more MSP businesses than ever, which means that it’s more difficult than ever before to stand out in the space and to increase your revenue. As such, it’s vitally important for MSPs to shift their business models to include data protection. By adding a cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery solution to your: Office 365 migration to cloud plan, you can increase your revenue but 15% per job.

Let’s talk about why this is so important.

The Importance of Data Protection

“Data is not just an important part of business—many firms consider it to be their most critical asset,” revealed a 2015 CompTIA 2015 Outlook research report.

No matter if your main customers are multi-national corporations or small- and medium-sized businesses data is what makes the wheels turn. By offering data protection, you’ll see ripple effects that increase your revenue, grow your business, and improve your customer and supplier relationships. The reason why is because data protection safeguards your customers’ data everywhere it lives, meaning that, suddenly, you’re not just an MSP business, you’re a partner in helping your customers navigate and succeed in the digital age where data is on premise, in virtual environments, in the cloud, and within third-party SaaS applications.

Data Protection as an MSP Cornerstone

Did you know? 22% of IT decision makers say that they are or will be employing cloud as part of their backup process, according to Enterprise Strategy Group, 2015.

The truth is that you cannot be an effective MSP business offering Office 365 migration to cloud services without a way to protect your customer’s data. MSPs that don’t offer a cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery solution only partly service their customers. That’s why it’s vital to make data protection—such as CloudAlly offers—an integral part of your business.

Backup and disaster recovery is a key component every MSP business. Without it, what are you managing? Imagine if your customer goes down and loses connection to their data during your Office 365 migration to cloud service. If you don’t have a data protection strategy in place, you’ll be fighting a batter with no solution to offer. The reality of the situation is that if you’re an MSP business, your customers are going to put you on the hook to recover their data if they suffer a loss. So, by having a cloud-to-cloud backup plan already in place, you ensure you’re for any eventuality.

The Benefits of Adding Data protection to Your MSP Business

Adding data protection to your MSP business isn’t just about making sure you can compete, there are a myriad of benefits that will directly impact your bottom line. Offering your customers a cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery solution will end up playing a large role in your success, and here’s how.

1. Increased Customer Referrals

Your customers know the value of data to their business. They know that 47% of enterprises have lost data in the cloud and had to restore their information from backups and that those losses can cost thousands of dollars and hundreds of staff-hours if they’re unprepared. By offering data protection as part of your Office 365 migration to cloud bundle, you provide a new “entry point” for potential customers.

Customers in pain want to hire companies that offer a total solution to their issue. They don’t want to have to go to five different businesses to find what they want and need; they want a one-stop shop that fulfills all their needs. By delivering the highest level of service—including offering a cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery solution—you’ll demonstrate your willingness to go “above and beyond” for every customer, which will increase the likelihood that you’ll be recommended to other businesses down the road.

2. Deeper Customer Relationships

You won’t receive additional customer referrals unless you first build a deeper relationship with your current customers. The essence of the MSP and customer relationship is service, and we’re not just talking about hardware and software services. The success of your MSP business is based on your customer service orientation. An exceptional customer service orientation means more frequent and better customer communication and more solutions to potential pain points.

By offering a cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery solution as part of your Office 365 migration to cloud service, you increase the confidence your customer has in what you offer. Think about it this way, what happens if your customer goes down and you can’t get them back up? In most cases, you’ve violated the trust your customer has placed in you, and they’ll cancel their contract and never give you another opportunity to work with them again. What’s worse is that that customer will probably share their bad experience with anyone who will listen.

That’s why data protection is so important. It’s a client data safeguard that protects both you and your customer from potentially dire consequences, and that customer service investment directly impacts your bottom line. When you build deeper relationships with your customers, you can charge higher rates, gain more business, and build your reputation.

3. Recurring Revenue

Already, many MSP businesses have developed recurring-revenue models, but that model is only possible if you have a service that someone is will to pay for month-over-month. Data protection is a linchpin for recurring-revenue models. Customers will be far more willing to pay you a fee every month if you give them the confidence to believe that their data and infrastructure will always be available.

And another benefit of the recurring-revenue model is that it means you can lower the price barrier to entry for your Office 365 migration to cloud customers. If you know you can charge a monthly fee for backup, recovery, and business continuity, then you can make it easier for your customers to acquire your service in the first place.

4. Less Work

The easiest way to be more profitable is to do less work. When you purchase CloudAlly’s backup and recovery solution, you don’t have to add any extra work to your own staff yet you increase your reliability and the confidence your customer has in your business.

CloudAlly allows you to manage all of your customers from a single account. This means that you can activate backups for all users with a single click, and even set auto-detect options for new users. And if you have to perform a restore, CloudAlly offers non-destructive restores from any point in time.

When you partner with CloudAlly, you gain the support of a vendor that understands and supports your need to resolve all of your customer issues clearly and quickly. Once your customers have signed up, you can sit back and relax and allow CloudAlly to worry about protecting all the necessary data.

Conclusion

Cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery is no longer just a “nice thing to have” when it comes to MSPs and the Office 365 migration to cloud service. It’s a necessary cornerstone of your business. If you lose your customer’s data, you’ll lose all their business forever, and they’ll tell their friends to avoid you as well.

Boost your profits, and protect your business and keep your customers happier by becoming a CloudAlly partner today.

Contact Us about how to add our cloud backup solution to your services and increase your profits.

Office 365 backup is bare without essentials – Part II

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How does Cloudally completes the needed slack?

In our previous post; Part I – deficiencies with existing default solutions, we explained how Microsoft’s current default services lack in protecting what really matters, when it comes to Office 365 file backup. The recycle bin and Exchange Online Archive do offer limited protection against data loss. However, CloudAlly is designed to make data loss a thing of the past.

While the recycle bin and in-place holds can help to keep files from being lost, they are not sufficient for disaster recovery in the event of data loss or corruption. CloudAlly provides that much-needed protection for all business users, including Office 365 SharePoint backup.

Unlike Office 365 Exchange Online Archiving or the recycle bin, CloudAlly performs a routine backup procedure of files and emails daily. This automated service allows users to keep working without having to remember to move files and emails into a special area. CloudAlly offers and added layer of protection by utilizing independent Amazon S3 storage in addition to Microsoft’s servers. There is no limitation to the amount of data backed up in this service, unlike with the recycle bin and EOA.

Due to CloudAlly’s nature of regular backups and saving all files deleted or modified, this service acts as a disaster recovery service. Users can recover lost or corrupted data due to accident or malicious attack from any point and time. Their backup services also allow users to restore data corrupted due to external systems or 3rd party application synchronization issues or automated tasks.

CloudAlly’s backup services protect users against ransomware attacks. This service allows you to regain data blocked off by ransomware viruses, such as CryptoLocker, without having to pay a fee to hackers.  When comparing CloudAlly’s services to Microsoft Exchange Online Archive, you can see there is a substantial difference between the services.

Office 365 file backup

With CloudAlly you get the complete backup solution:

  • Disaster Recovery/ Point-in-Time Recovery of lost or corrupted files
  • Includes all items deleted or modified
  • No limit to retention period
  • Unlimited storage
  • Simply select and restore restoration process
  • Item level restore available via granular search or date snapshot
  • Folder level restoration available via date snapshot
  • Mailbox level restoration available via date snapshot
  • Export available in .eml, .vcf, .etc or Outlook .pst format
  • Restore mailbox data to any specified destination
  • Pause backups to archive mailbox indefinitely
  • Auto-detect feature automatically activates backup for new mailboxes
  • ISO 27001 and HIPAA certified
  • Stored on secure AWS S3 storage with choice of datacenter location either US, Europe, Australia
  • Daily summary email with backup activity overview
  • Administrative audit capability

Office 365 users may think their data is already backed up on Microsoft Azure servers. While Microsoft does backup all data internally, it is only available to clients for 14 days. Microsoft’s Exchange Online Archiving is a viable, albeit limited, solution for archiving data for litigation. It is not, however, a suitable substitute for disaster recovery due to the lack of restoration capability.

Companies interested in keeping costs low may be surprised at the affordability of CloudAlly’s backup services. Instead of charging per license, CloudAlly’s flat rate of $3 per month or $30 per year can help keep overhead down. Larger companies, academics, and non-profit organizations may be eligible for a discount.

Coming up in our next blog post: A quick guide to backup & restore – Part III, we’ll show you how easy it is to back-up your Office 365 backup for files using CloudAlly’s automated Office 365 file backup solution.

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Office 365 backup is bare without essentials from CloudAlly

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Part I – Deficiencies with existing default solutions

Office 365 cloud backup

Microsoft Office 365 provides businesses with a simple to use interface where employees can collaborate on files from anywhere at any time. Backing up these files without the addition of CloudAlly’s Online Backup tools, however, is severely restricted. Users are forced to use the built-in tools of the recycle bin or the Exchange Online Archiving tool.

While these Office 365 data backup options have their uses, they are limited in their disaster recovery abilities. So, what about your Office 365 cloud backup?

Did you know ? Recycle Bins Are Not Recovery Options

A lot of people throw items in the recycle bin and then allow it to sit there until they are certain the data is no longer needed. By not hard deleting the file, they feel confident restoration is possible should an issue arise.
However, the recycle bin is not designed to be a holding place for Office 365 backups. The design is simply a place to put rubbish.

  • Recycle bins are only good for short-term recovery which can be restored by the user. Unlike other programs, there is no file level or mailbox level restoration option. Each document must be hard restored by locating it in the bin, selecting it, and choosing restore. The files are irretrievable once the user purges files from the recycle bin.
  • Recycle bins should not be used to backup the mailbox for Office 365. Information from deactivated mailboxes remains for 30 days. After that time, the system permanently deletes all messages.

Unlike other Office 365 backup solutions, there is no charge to have a recycle bin. Every Office 365 account includes a recycle bin. However, it is not designed to be a long-term option to protect data from loss or corruption.

Exchange Online Archiving Offers Slightly More Protection
When comparing to the general recycle bin, the Exchange Online Archiving (EOA) feature does offer greater protection. Microsoft Office 365 data backup located in the EOA is on their redundant servers offering some protection against loss and corruption. Users with an E2 or E3 plan have the EOA included in their service plans. All other accounts must pay an additional $3 per month per user.

Recoverable items folders are limited to 100 GB. However, once you reach the storage limit, you may not be able to permanently deleted items, empty the deleted items folder or use the versioning process.

Holds must be activated by the administrator for each employee, as they are not there by default. An administrator must remove a hold before deletion of any affected mailbox.

The best EOA security is an in-place hold. The hold is a legal protection for data needed for discovery as it preserves information.

In-place holds are indefinite and remain in place until canceled. However, there are no true recovery options for an in-place litigation hold. The data moves into a recoverable item folder. The information remains in the folder until one of two situations arise: the administrator removes the data or the hold time expires.

Export of data for Office 365 email backup is limited to an Outlook compatible .pst file. You can also create a search query to run discovery on documents stored within the hold folder. The search results can be exported to a .pst file as well. However, this is as close to an official backup for exchange online for Office 365 the service provides.

All in-place holds require support eDiscovery for litigation. There may be other legal requirements that your company may need to follow. However, these requirements and eDiscovery support may not provide the recovery of information due to corruption or loss.

EOA also offers an in-place archive as an alternative solution to a hold. An In-place archive is slightly different. Unlike with the hold, the archiving feature has an unlimited storage option for those using the Office 365 E3 plan. Other plans have a limit of 50 GB per user, which is sufficient. Users reaching this limit must delete files to archive more data.
Each user has an archival mailbox for older messages. Like all other mailboxes, there is a recoverable items folder for deleted emails. However, that is the extent of the recovery options for an archive.

In our next blog post; How Cloudally completes the needed slack – we’ll show you how CloudAlly can help you protect your data from accidental deletion. Recycle bin and EOA are limited in what they can offer as far as defense against malware and loss. You can get more coverage by using our automated Office 365 backup service.

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The Importance of Regional Data Centers for Office 365 Backup

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When it comes to Office 365 backup, there’s a lot of confusion about what’s appropriate for each small and medium-sized business.  Some people think that nothing else is needed, but Microsoft’s cloud backup comes with an unwanted element of risk.

Office 365 doesn’t offer daily backup and recovery services that make it easy to restore data removed from the recycle bin, nor is it prepared for unexpected malicious activity and data corruption caused by a 3rd party. That’s why additional cloud backup services are so vital. But they’re not all created equal.

Many cloud backup companies offer a single data center and expect that to be enough, but it’s not. Cloud location matters. That’s why CloudAlly offers regional AWS (Amazon Web Services) data centers in the US, EU, and Australia.

Using regional data centers expands the reach of CloudAlly’s backup and recovery solutions to provide data backup while complying with the relevant laws across countries. Organizations have a legal and ethical obligation to protect and store their data according to the specifications of their region, and it’s only through regional cloud-based data storage that this is possible.

Why Regional Data Centers Matter

For European customers, CloudAlly’s EU data center makes it possible for businesses to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that was recently adopted by the EU. In addition to satisfying the required data sovereignty concerns, the regional data center in Europe also decreases the latency times and increases efficiency for backing up, restoring, and exporting data for EU customers.

As for U.S. customers with operations abroad, regional data backup and recovery centers in the EU and Australian provide the ability to comply with data requirements in other gee-regions. And for our Australian clients, our regional AWS data center complies with the Australian Privacy Policies (APPs) enforced by the Privacy Act.

So, why does location matter when it comes to Office 365 backup? Regional backups offer a few distinct competitive advantages.

1. Protection

Cloud backup failure and outages are rare, but they can and do happen. That’s why regional backup centers are so necessary. It’s also important and considered best practice to isolate you backups from the original source data. CloudAlly’s use of AWS data centers ensures that your backup data is still available even if there is a temporary service disruption in Microsoft Azure.
So, how is this different than other backup services? Let’s say you’re using a backup provider that stores data on Microsoft Azure. If Azure is unavailable for any reason, your company will lose access to both your backups and Office 365. With CloudAlly, even in the event of an Azure service disruption, you can still export your previous day’s backup in Outlook compatible .pst format and continue working locally until the Azure service is restored.

2. Latency

Response times for the end user are very important for Office 365 backup as well as cloud application use. In fact, response times have the most significant impact on user satisfaction. That’s why having regional data centers close to your users is important. The longer the distance your data has to travel, the greater potential for latency.

According to Verizon Enterprise, in North America the average network latency is about 40ms. However, trans-Atlantic latency between the U.S. and Europe is about 80ms almost double. That means if you’re a European company or an American business with most of its customers in Europe, they’ll experience twice the delay compared to their American counterparts.

CloudAlly is one of the few services to provide data center options in all major geo-regions including North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, making the service available to partners and clients around the world. Having these regional data centers also improves latency in another way, through a balanced workload.

The balanced workload model means that no one server is over-provisioned and that each regional data center is capable of handling the workload of another data center in the event an emergency should occur. This balance ensures that no one system is ever over-taxed or at risk of failure, which means you won’t need to worry about lag times or down times like you would with a cloud backup service with only a single data center.

3. Privacy

Regional data centers are becoming more and more important for global cloud growth, especially as surveillance controversies have increased the focus on data sovereignty and customer privacy. As more countries seek to keep their citizens’ data within their borders, cloud backup providers are discovering that single-location data centers do not suffice.

Different types of data have different locality requirements. At CloudAlly, we understand that multi-nationals sometimes have multiple Office 365 tenants for operations and/or subsidiaries in other geo-regions. Data privacy regulations require that data remain in its original geo-region, so with our data centers located in the US, EU, and Australia we help you ensure that you’re covered no matter where you’re located.

In addition, local data centers keep your data better protected from hijackers and keep it out from under the jurisdiction of countries that have nothing to do with your business or your customers. “Information flow through the Internet often involves transmission through many countries, traveling the path of least congestion,” describers Data Center Knowledge. “Any of these countries through which your data passes can claim jurisdiction—including countries where your traffic path may have been hijacked through hackers.”

There are also binding agreements between countries, which allows one country’s agents to require the assistance of another country to obtain information through mutual legal assistance treaties (MLAT). By keeping your data within your region, you minimize the risk of having to reveal private and secure data.

And CloudAlly adheres to the highest standards when it comes to privacy and data security. Our Office 365 Backup services comply with stringent EU privacy directives, plus we routinely conduct security audits and assessments to confirm that we continually meet those directives. In addition, all of our regional data centers have all necessary certifications (ISO 27001 and HIPPA) and undergo regular compliance audits for your protection.

Choosing CloudAlly Office 365 Backup

And when you choose CloudAlly’s Office 365 backup, you’re choosing a service that is compatible with more than one application. CloudAlly works with Gmail backup, SharePoint backup, OneDrive backup, and more. And all it takes are a few simple clicks to activate your backups for your entire company or a few selected users.

You can learn more about CloudAlly’s backup services by setting up a free trial or contact us today +1.917.338.0385.

Tidy Employee Off-Boarding

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Tidy Employee Off-Boarding with Google Apps backup, Microsoft Mail Exchange, etc.

In HR, when you follow up on someone’s departure in a typical off-boarding process, you’re probably just asking IT to “get everything” from that person’s workstation, as you deal with other practical aspects like desk space and benefits updates.

But what if IT isn’t able to come up with all of that data?

When people go, they leave their desks and computers. They leave their job position unfilled. They also leave behind troves of data that can be extremely important to the business stored in Office 365 as well as in Google Apps backup, both of which can be backed-up.

Think about it — the job doesn’t stop when the person leaves. There are deals in the making, everyday communications going back and forth between vendors and suppliers and customers, and a kind of “cloud” of data (no pun intended) hanging over that person’s assigned role. This includes items like engineering innovations, contractual obligations, sales information and all sorts of data on all kinds of databases.

So what happens to all that stuff when the person who had been working with it is suddenly gone?

Sour Grapes and Other Scenarios
In many cases, the whole company is relying on HR to be the gate keeper in letting someone go, and making sure the on-going business isn’t affected.

First of all, as someone in HR or leadership, you have to worry about people acting out if they’re not happy with the situation at hand, or if they have an ax to grind with their former employer. It’s only too easy for a salesperson to delete his or her email contacts or other deal information, or for a lawyer to delete legal data, or for any disgruntled person to take a swipe at their online and electronic data on their way out. And so often, people are leaving angry. They don’t like that they didn’t get a promotion, or they were called out for improper behavior, or they don’t like their new boss. It all leads to incentives to get back at the company by just hitting the delete button.

But even if there are no hard feelings, and the person is leaving isn’t out for blood, they may just accidentally delete some of these items through simple mistakes.

Companies have to know that the crucial data that the next person will need will be there when that person enters the open job position. That extends to the massive amounts of information flying around between email inboxes. It often extends to chat messaging data, or Word documents on a workstation, or video and multimedia content.

Basically, human resources needs all of that data to be there on day one when they fill the position — not lost somewhere in the ether, where IT people have to go in and try to re-create what was happening through difficult data forensics, especially in Google Apps backup.

Sure, you can go to great pains to recover data, and you can even sue, as in this case of a pharma manager willfully deleting key files before leaving, but all of that is damage control. It’s better to have things backed up in the first place.

Make Sure It’s All Backed Up
If you are someone in HR who just realized you need this kind of backup service, go ahead and ask IT what they’re backing up. Is it just the emails? The messaging? Are trade secrets and other pieces of data secure?

Only a relatively few companies offer these kind of comprehensive backups.  IT admins are responsible for data backup procedures for disaster recovery and business continuity requirements, but the right backup service such as CloudAlly can add unexpected benefits to HR such as:

On-boarding
– Automatically backup new employees data when their added to the system, eliminating the need for the admin to manually activate a backup and the possibility of overlooking the task.

Off-boarding
– Providing the ability to recover data that was accidentally or maliciously, deleted or corrupted as a result of an employee termination, especially an unexpected termination where the access has not been revoked following normal off-boarding processes.

– Removing the Office 365 service license to save costs when off-boarding an employee, while still retaining the backup archives for a specific length of time (3, 6, 12, etc, months) for potential litigation.

– The ability to perform a cross-user restore in order to restore an ex-employees mailbox or folders to the new person assuming the responsibility.

With excellent service, ease-of-use and reliability, Cloudally has the right stuff for retaining information from applications like Google Apps backup (G Suite), Salesforce, Office 365, Yahoo! Mail, and other platforms. Get unlimited data retention, easy exporting, and automated backups with a minimum of on-site storage and cost. Let Cloudally help make sure that when a person leaves the business, their business data stays put – because when it comes to having all of the necessary resources on hand, it’s “better safe than sorry.”  We offer a Free Trial Click Here to sign up for Google apps backup, and other services.

CloudAlly Backup versus Exchange Online Archiving

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Exchange Online Archiving Vs CloudAlly Online Backup with Amazon AWS

In this article we will compare two methods to backup and protect Office 365 data: Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving (EOA) and CloudAlly.

It is important to understand the key differences between these two Office 365 backup options and to know whether they can suffice individually or need to be used together.

Things to Look for in an Office 365 Data Protection Plan

In order to compare CloudAlly and EOA, we first need to understand what should be considered while choosing a suitable data protection service or tool for Office 365 Exchange Online.

The service should be able to retain (on a long-term basis) and preserve data for legal, compliance and archiving challenges.

It should also be able to search and retrieve the data online, namely eDiscovery. The data backup or protection tool should furthermore be able to access the data and carry out a point-in-time restore or recovery of the data for business continuity.

You may argue that recycle bins, which contain deleted items as well as recoverable items, support the recovery of deleted data.

However, these bins only help for a limited period of time and do not support long-term data retention, point-in-time recovery and data preservation.

Exchange Online Archiving

EOA is a cloud-based archiving solution that enables your enterprise to address compliance, legal, archiving and eDiscovery challenges for Office 365 data.

It is hosted on Microsoft globally redundant servers and offers compatibility with Exchange Server 2010, 2013 and 2016. What is more, it is also available as an add-on for online hosted mailboxes.

Detailed Features and Benefits

EOA offers security and reliability features for retaining and preserving emails, complying with the law and your enterprise’s policy for eDiscovery and litigation.

In-Place Archive

This feature gives all the Office 365 users in your company a native and seamlessly integrated experience to retain or keep all your email data in one place.

It provides a separate mailbox, or archive mailbox, to store all such historical email messages. This mailbox has its own recoverable items folder for deleted emails.

You can manually move or even copy the relevant mails from a primary mailbox folder to an archive mailbox folder.

Alternatively, you can use the inbox rules to automatically move or copy emails to the archive mailbox. You can even use the retention policies to move the emails.

This “in-place archiving” feature can be activated for every user. It can also have an unlimited storage limit (as per the Office 365 E3 plan) or a limit of up to 50 GB (which, in itself, is quite sufficient on an individual user level).

When this limit is reached, the users need to delete the archived items to ensure that the archiving activity resumes again.

In-Place Hold

This functionality, which is also known as the litigation hold, enables you to immutably preserve and hold electronically stored user information for discovery at a later point in time. It prevents your users from modifying or deleting the data on which the hold is placed.

The litigation hold, as available with Exchange 2010, places the hold on all the user mailbox data indefinitely or until the hold is removed.

The in-place hold, as available for Exchange 2013, works better because it does not hold the entire mailbox indefinitely. Instead, it allows you to place the hold on specific data and for a specific period of time. It is thus a time-based hold.

If you do not specify the end date for the in-place hold, it holds the data indefinitely. It is then an indefinite hold.

You can also place a hold (query-based hold) on the desired items that match specific parameters, such as dates, keywords, and sender or recipient addresses.

For both these types of holds, the recoverable items folder is used to preserve the mailbox items. They use a versioning process to maintain the history of the data for cases when the data is changed.

The storage limit for the recoverable items folder is 100 GB, because the items are preserved here indefinitely or until the hold period expires.

Your Office 365 users will not be able to permanently delete any items, empty the deleted items folder or use the versioning process, if the folder storage limit is reached.

So, you may get your held mailbox limit increased through the Office 365 support team.

In-Place eDiscovery

This enables you to search, produce and even manage across your organization through an easy-to-use web interface.

In simple terms, it helps you search your primary inbox items as well as the archive mailbox items for Mails, Calendars, Tasks, Contacts, Attachments, and so on.

The results of the search can be copied to the discovery mailbox. Alternatively, these results can be exported in the .pst format for compatibility with Microsoft Outlook.

Pricing

The full functionality of the EOA is available with the Exchange Online Plan 2 and Office 365 Enterprise Plan E3.

For all other Exchange Online plans or Office 365 enterprise plans, the EOA features are available at $3 per month for each user.

Limitations

Both the in-place hold and in-place archiving functions cease to work once the storage quota of the mailboxes is reached. Furthermore, there is no provision for unlimited storage. Moreover, both these features have to be activated for each user, which is a cumbersome task.

 

CloudAlly

CloudAlly is a cloud-based data backup service. It offers automated daily backups of not only Office 365 data, but also for SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Apps, Salesforce and others to unlimited Amazon secure storage, unlike exchange online archiving.

It is a comprehensive backup and recovery service for Office 365 Exchange Online data.

Detailed Features and Benefits

It supports business continuity through point-in-time recovery of data that has been lost or even corrupted.

CloudAlly also takes care of the operational requirements for the recovery of data that is corrupted or destroyed through an accident or through malicious or virus attacks.

Backup

CloudAlly has no storage limitation and offers unlimited retention of daily archives. This enables backups on a daily basis and helps to considerably reduce the on-premises storage requirements.

The backed up data is furthermore encrypted every day and stored on Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 storage. Every backup that is made, using CloudAlly, is a point-in-time snapshot of the relevant data.

You are capable of controlling all your backups from a single management console. This saves a lot of time for your enterprise since it does away with the admin processes that require plenty of manual effort.

The Office 365 users in your company also do not have access to the CloudAlly backups because they are entirely maintained by the administrators.

It is thus possible to activate the backups not only for individual users, but also for all the users. New users can then be activated for the backups by using the auto-detect feature.

Restore

If there is a requirement to restore any data at an individual item level or even at a higher level (folder, mailbox, and so on), it is possible to search your CloudAlly backups.

The restored data gets stored in a sub-folder named “CloudAlly Restore” with a date and time stamp. The data can then be restored directly to the user’s account.

It is even possible to restore it back to a different user account, if such a need arises.

Export

With CloudAlly, you can export the backed up data in various industry standard formats, including .vcf and .eml.

You can even do the data export in the .pst format, which is compatible with Microsoft Outlook, which is the most common email platform used in enterprises.

In a nutshell, CloudAlly backs up, restores and exports data (Mails, Tasks, Calendars, Contacts, and more.) in its entirety.

It even extends this functionality to OneDrive data and SharePoint data. Moreover, it helps to recover data from any point in time by using a non-destructive restore. And, it offers unlimited retention and storage of all backups.

Furthermore, CloudAlly adheres to data security and customer confidentiality best practices, as it is HIPAA compliant and ISO 27001 certified.

You also get the option to select servers based in the US (by default), EU or Australia.

Pricing

You can avail the Office 365 backup services from CloudAlly at a rate of $3 per month (or $30 annually) per user and less.

For every 5 GB of OneDrive or SharePoint data, you can use these services at $2 per month (or $20 per year) and less. You can even get additional discounts if you run an academic or non-profit organization or perhaps if you deal in volumes as a partner.

Limitations

CloudAlly cannot completely handle eDiscovery requirements for the appropriate search and retrieval of data.

However, it is working towards adding this functionality in its entirety. It also retains all the data and lacks any rules to retain only specific sets of data.

Moreover, no versioning is done within individual data items that are backed up chronologically.