Microsoft 365 Backup: Protect your business with data recovery

In today's digital age, ensuring the safety and availability of your data is paramount. Microsoft 365 offers robust solutions for data backup and recovery, designed to help restore your data and get your business back on track in the face of various challenges like ransomware events or accidental deletions. Microsoft 365 Backup services go beyond standard protection to make sure that your data remains compliant, protected, and recoverable when you need it most.

Backup is not about just backing up data anymore, it’s about fast recovery in a secure environment. If you don’t have a fast restore solution, then your data is still at risk.  

Why backup your Microsoft 365 data?

As your organization creates and stores more data, it’s important that you protect your operations from bad actors and state-sponsored ransomware attacks, which are on the rise. Microsoft 365 has a shared responsibility model, where Microsoft provides the availability and durability of the service, while customers are responsible for their data management and protection. Microsoft offers ways to help you maintain business continuity in both service failure and customer-side breaches.

Service failure: Microsoft 365 natively offers high availability and disaster recovery. This is covered in the standard Microsoft 365 data resiliency documentation. While no service has guaranteed 100% uptime, the key considerations are data durability and speed of recovery; both of which Microsoft 365 handles natively and robustly.

Customer-side data breaches, such as ransomware attacks or mistaken modification/deletion, require a fast and scalable restore solution that provides a recovery path to keep your business running. We highly recommend procuring either the native Microsoft 365 Backup solution or a recognized ISV application built on Microsoft 365 Backup Storage. These solutions are best equipped to recover your tenant’s data quickly at scale, offering protection and peace of mind while ensuring your data remains compliant.

How Microsoft 365 Backup goes beyond standard backup

Microsoft 365 Backup offers distinct advantages over standard high availability and disaster recovery provided by the base service and over traditional export-only solutions. Namely, it provides heightened security and privacy, and most importantly it provides a fast recovery path for an extended period of time. The enhanced security and privacy come from the fact that your data is kept in its natively encrypted format within the Microsoft 365 trust boundary.

Simplify compliance, enhance security, and support data residency

Automatic geo residency adherence	Strictly limited data access and scope	Fully auditable actions	Immutable backup storage

This retains the security, compliance, and privacy promises inherent in our services. It also puts control over these restores into your hands, rather than managing the restore through support agents. This can provide crucial time savings when every minute counts. Admins can restore individual files, emails, calendar items, and site metadata either in-place or to new locations, minimizing disruption. Microsoft 365 automatically backs up data and offers restore points for the past 14 days. With the addition of Microsoft 365 Backup, you can restore data from Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive to effectively any point within the past year— safeguarding business data so that you can recover it back to a healthy state.

While Microsoft 365 includes 14 days of standard point-in-time backup, Microsoft 365 Backup has a 1-year retention period with recovery point objectives of every 10 minutes for Exchange, and every 10 minutes for 14 days, then weekly for OneDrive and SharePoint. See the table below for more details.

With Microsoft 365 Backup or an ISV solution built on our platform, you can restore your OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange Online data at bulk recovery speeds of up to and beyond 3TB per hour for large scale bulk restores for an average-size tenant (Microsoft research, 2025).

Ransomware is a growing concern  

Ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly common, posing significant threats to organizations of all sizes. These attacks involve malicious software that encrypts a victim's data, rendering it inaccessible until a ransom is paid. “The frequency of ransomware incidents has been on the rise, with many organizations experiencing multiple attacks within a year. Verizon Business found that the presence of Ransomware, with or without encryption, in their dataset, in 44% of all the breaches they reviewed in 2025, up from 32% in 2024 – a 37% year-over-year increase” (Verizon Business, 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report: Executive Summary, 2025).

Safeguard your business with Microsoft 365 Backup

When you invest in a backup solution, you're essentially buying the ability to recover from a disastrous event, like a ransomware attack. It's important to restore business operations and critical data as quickly as possible to maintain business continuity and restore to the state (point in time) that your business requires. In addition, the complexity for IT admins in managing large-scale data across their ecosystem necessitates a solution designed for recovery at scale.

Microsoft 365 Backup provides that even in the event of an attack, your data can be restored quickly – all without the additional risk and complexity of granting multiple applications read and write access over your data.  

Get started today

Don’t wait for disaster to strike. Start backing up smarter, restoring faster, and sleeping easier. Check out our step-by-step guide for setting up Microsoft 365 Backup and our full Microsoft 365 Backup Best Practices Whitepaper for more information.