Three Reasons Why Your SMB Clients Should Back Up Office 365 Data

The growing popularity of Microsoft Office 365 shows no signs of slowing down, especially among the small-to-medium sized business (SMB) crowd.

SMBs like the convenience of having a mission-critical email platform like Exchange combined with Microsoft’s personal productivity and collaboration applications and hosted in a cloud environment. That’s part of the reason why analyst firm by the end of this year.

But not all SMBs are aware that, even though Office 365 information is hosted in the cloud, it’s still important to have a backup stored elsewhere. That’s why the newest version of Carbonite Server Backup offers hybrid backup and recovery for Exchange Online data (including email and contacts) created and hosted in Office 365. The combination of Office 365, Carbonite and your unique services makes for a great solution bundle that will protect your SMB customers from disaster while improving your bottom line.

It’s tempting to think that SMBs do not need to back up or archive email and other information housed in Office 365. After all, Office 365 storage is both cheap and plentiful. And Microsoft’s service level agreement provides a high level of durability and redundancy--which means that their hard drive won’t crash with the only copy of your email on it. Finally, Microsoft also offers archiving for an additional fee.

But the fact remains that users who fail to back up or archive email and other important information in Office 365 are taking a big risk. Here’s a look at the three reasons why it’s important to use an outside service to back up or archive mission-critical data that’s housed in Office 365:

1. Do you want all your eggs in the Microsoft basket?
   A lot of the information SMBs store in the cloud is mission critical. That includes, but is not limited to, emails and files in OneDrive. And, I don’t know about you, but I would never be comfortable with the prospect of having an outside entity be the sole custodian of every copy of that data. Whether it’s Microsoft or some other cloud provider, it’s essential to have a way to access your data should your relationship with the vendor deteriorate, or if their system somehow becomes unavailable.
2. Avoiding data loss
   Having an extra copy of your data outside of the cloud vendor’s facility is a good idea because there are many ways that data can be lost through malicious or accidental deletion. Once it’s deleted, it’s deleted. And any failure to have an outside backup copy could spell trouble for your SMB customers.
3. Cost savings
   Using an outside backup service can also reduce the costs of managing the email accounts of former employees. For SMBs that want to keep former employees’ data for eDiscovery or regulatory reasons, it pays to explore less expensive backup or options.

Why bundle?

When you sell Carbonite products combined with your own services--such as installation, monitoring and maintenance--and with other IT solutions--such as Microsoft Office 365--you not only increase profit margins, but you also serve as your customers’ single source for a complete IT solution. Offering pre-packaged bundles can be an attractive marketing opportunity, but you can usually maximize order values by talking to customers individually and tailoring a unique solution to meet their needs.

Visit to learn more about Carbonite Server Backup, which can easily be bundled with Office 365.

John Durant is Director of Channel Sales at Carbonite, a provider of powerful yet simple cloud and hybrid backup solutions for small to midsize businesses. . Guest blogs such as this one are published monthly and are part of Talkin' Cloud's annual platinum sponsorship.

 

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