They are in fact incredibly versatile servers with a variety of functions and purposes. As a person that has had their head in the clouds so long, I didn’t realise that NAS units were more than simply “network attached storage”. The reality is, that as organisations start moving more workloads to the cloud, their on-premises footprint decreases – but sometimes they still need something to provide functionality as well as give them peace of mind. Recently I got my hands on the newly-released Synology DS920+ NAS unit and came across the “Active Backup for Office 365” package bundled with the unit and wondered why such a solution exists, especially given there are so many established vendors in the market such as Veritas, AvePoint, CommVault, and others. For many years it’s been commonplace for someone in a small business to take the backup tapes home with them on a regular rotation, so doing away with this when moving to the cloud can be a challenge to accept.

So, when vendors claim that they can back up “everything” in Office 365 – it is a categorically false claim.Īnd while for regulated organisations, being able to back up as much as they can of Office 365 can sometimes be enough, in the case of small businesses – they just want something they can touch. The issue with backing up Office 365 is that there’s too many services that don’t offer API access, and therefore one can never truly back up the platform. This is especially the case in government, however, is becoming less and less enforced. I’ve tended to agree, however understand where some organisations have a regulatory requirement to keep backups in a separate environment. Microsoft sellers will tell you that it’s not required because features such as retention policies and unlimited archives render make the need for backups redundant. I’ve been working with Office 365 for a loooong time (over 10 years if you include my time with its predecessor, BPOS) and the topic of backups has come up many, many times.

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