Forum Discussion
Back-up tools for Office 365
Good reply, but you're still limited to the basic workloads. That's fine because every backup vendor who seeks to work with Office 365 is limited in the same manner. The exception to date is AvePoint (which you don't mention) because they can at least deal with the Outlook variant of Office 365 Groups.
As to making a big thing of being able to handle on-premises and cloud environments, I am not sure that this is so important. First, you deal with two very different environments and there is no evidence to suggest that it is wise or good to use the same approach in both. Second, a case can be argued that a better approach is to select the best of breed solution for each environment. Third, the case for Office 365 backups is still debatable, especially when no vendor can handle the intracicies of the new world...
Well, AvePoint already have a solution to recover the documents and conversations for Outlook-based Office 365 Groups, so some improvement in the state of most backup products is demonstrably possible.
I think the solution will be to use the Microsoft Graph APIs (which are available) to understand the links between items in these complex applications (Plans, Teams, Groups) so that backup products can extract and restore data in context. Conceptually, this is the same as the recent change made in Exchange where a recovered item can be restored back to its original folder (https://www.petri.com/exchange-recover-deleted-items).
What I am looking for from backup vendors - and what I continually challenge them to demonstrate - is some spark of innovation that moves backup technology away from the classic approach of opening a site/mailbox/database and streaming out its complete content to a backup location to a point where intelligent assessments are made of where data exists and how it is connected so that when the data are copied, they can be reassembled in context if necessary. It is regrettable that six years after the launch of Office 365, we still have not made much progress in this space, especially so in light of the fact that so many new connected applications now exist (Stream is the latest example).
I believe that there is substantial first-mover advantage to be gained by the backup vendor that embraces how Office 365 works rather than how on-premises products work. Maybe I will see some change at Ignite in September...
TR
We don't use the same approach for on-prem and Office 365 (Because you can't) but what we do provide is a centralized management console (Barracuda Cloud Control) that covers both environments (and much more) and provides the same features and capabilities for both, wherever this is possible.
Our customers find that this saves them a great deal of time and effort, as it greatly simplifies the ongoing management burden, compared with say managing several "Best of breed" point solutions, each with different consoles, features, capabilities, licensing, security models etc. etc.
As I'm sure you know, Office 365 provides a common set of API's that all vendors have to go through, in order to provide data protection, recovery, archiving, security etc. So, this levels out the playing field for all vendors somewhat, as we're all limited by the same set of API's.
Put simply, until Microsoft provides 3rd parties with sufficient access to the platform, API's etc., the solution that you're looking for (And I agree would be better) will not be possible.
