Backup Office 365 to cloud or to on premise?

[kane_cunningham]

Trying to figure out where to backup our company's Office 365. (to another cloud or to on prem)

What things should I consider when choosing a destination to backup my O365?

 

If to cloud, why? If to on prem, why?

Wondering what other people mostly do.

Thanks in advance.

Edited December 24, 2019 by kane_cunningham

[smithson83]

I suppose it depends on the rest of your Backup strategy (location etc), and what your plans are with regards to on prem servers as a whole.

 

If you have a SIP to move ooff site, then I'd be going that way. On the other hand, if you don't, or you have a ton of spare on prem storage then this would be a quick win.

[Soulfish]

So coming at this from a slightly different angle (I'm responsible for O365 for a large-multinational where downtime is measured in $millions/minute), but we don't backup O365. At all. MS provides two weeks of backups if required (and yes we've had them restore roughly 0.5PB before) within SharePoint/OneDrive and Exchange is an active-active failover between multiple datacenters in different countries.

 

For us it's just not feasible or sensible to backup O365. We physically couldn't extract data fast enough, and the costs to store the backups for the amount of data we have in O365 just don't make sense. We carried out the risk assessment when we moved to O365 that ultimately what we were getting from MS was better than we could provide ourselves and met our business requirements.

[DrCheese]

Do you pay MS enough money tho that they'd bend over backwards to get you up and running? A worry with the education 365 is that as we get a lot of it for free, we're right down at the bottom of the support pile...

[Soulfish]

Do you pay MS enough money tho that they'd bend over backwards to get you up and running? A worry with the education 365 is that as we get a lot of it for free, we're right down at the bottom of the support pile...

 

Yes, that's certainly a consideration! We're big enough that we tend to deal directly with the various MS Product Groups when we have an issue and bypass a lot of "normal" support channels.

 

Although I do also run O365 tenants that are tiny and have had MS restore stuff in a timely manner (in line with their published SLAs). Ultimately I think its a case of what can you live without while MS support carry out a restore vs the absolute critical stuff that you need. That supercritical stuff look at potential having somewhere else as a safeguard, depending on your risk appetite/cost appetite.

[jmak]

We carried out the risk assessment when we moved to O365 that ultimately what we were getting from MS was better than we could provide ourselves and met our business requirements.

 

For me, this is what it comes down to. Even with your individual expertise, given the resources you're likely to have as a school, you just can't get near what MS offers. And personally I know my individual expertise won't get anywhere near the level of what MS have either....

 

The other consideration for me is that I couldn't envisage a scenario for us where we needed everything back instantly. As long as the data is there, I'd only expect to need one file at a time. That largely takes dependency on a broadband connection out of the equation - a 4g mobile connection per user should be fine for most people.

 

The obvious exception would be video files for editing, but I'm guessing they wouldn't be in O365 anyway.