One of the most common questions we hear from business owners in Mississauga is some version of: "We moved to Microsoft 365 — so we don't need backups any more, right?" It is a reasonable assumption. Microsoft runs enormous, resilient data centres and Exchange Online has excellent uptime. But uptime and backup are different promises, and the gap between them is where businesses get hurt.
What Microsoft is responsible for
Microsoft's shared-responsibility model is explicit: Microsoft is responsible for the infrastructure — the servers, the network, the availability of the service. If a data centre fails, your mail keeps flowing. That is what you are paying for.
What you are responsible for
Your data. Microsoft provides short-term safety nets — the Recycle Bin, retention windows, version history — but they are limited in time and scope, and they are not designed as a recovery system. A few situations we have seen in real environments:
- A departing employee's mailbox is deleted with the account; 90 days later, someone needs an email from it. It is gone.
- A SharePoint library is overwritten by a sync error and nobody notices for weeks — past the version history window.
- Ransomware encrypts files on a laptop; OneDrive faithfully syncs the encrypted versions to the cloud and to every other device.
- A retention policy is changed by mistake and purges records the business is legally required to keep.
What a proper Microsoft 365 backup looks like
An independent copy of Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams data, stored outside your tenant, with retention you control — years, not weeks. Restores should be granular (one email, one file, one folder) and fast, and someone should actually test them on a schedule. At Spicsoft the backup is monitored daily and restore-tested, so proof replaces assumption.
What it costs
Far less than the outage it prevents. Microsoft 365 backup is priced per user per month and is one of the cheapest line items in a managed IT agreement. Compared with a week of reconstructing a finance mailbox from memory, it is not a close call.
If you are on Microsoft 365 and are not certain an independent backup exists, that is worth a five-minute conversation. We can check your tenant and tell you plainly where you stand.
