Most SMEs consider security and disaster recovery solutions to be too costly and unnecessary. A better way of approaching this topic is to explore the real cost of not implementing adequate security and data recovery solutions. What price tag can you put on reputational and intellectual property loss?
Online email services provide awesome features and are great value for money. The customer gets best in class services without the cost and complexities of running and maintaining his / her own servers. So far so good.
The service provider’s contractual obligation is to ensure that your emails are kept secure (as much as the technology allows) and that their service is always abundantly available. That’s as far as their obligation towards the customer goes. In their pursuit of 99.99% uptime, the providers will deploy multiple servers and ensure their systems are backed up.
I am sure the question on your mind now is, “If the systems are backed up? Why do I need to invest in my own backup solution?” Good question…. The answer is simple really. The Email provider’s backup is there to ensure that in the event of an occurrence on their servers that results in the complete loss of your mailbox, they can restore your entire mailbox from the most recent backup. Their backup is not there for you to restore individual mail items (calendar entries, emails) that may have been accidentally or intentionally deleted from your mailbox. Yes, most email systems have a recycle bin and even if an item is deleted from the recycle bin provide a window in which the items can be recovered. This window can be anywhere from a few days to a month; beyond that …. Well, you get picture. I am sure you are starting to get the picture now.
You want to invest in a backup solution so that in the event of accidental or malicious purging of your emails (disgruntled or crooked employees have been known to do this) you can preform a restore, 1 month, 6 months… a year from the occurrence.
We provide an online backup solution for Gmail and Microsoft 365 Online services. Not only does our solution backup emails but SharePoint (sites and libraries) and One Drive for Microsoft. While it also backs up Google Drive and Shared Team Drives on the Google platform.