Office 365 Exchange Backup Procedures and Third-Party Backup with CloudAlly’s Office 365 Exchange Backup

Office 365 Exchange Online is an immensely effective app, but it has one significant issue. While Office 365 offers a few limited built-in and one-time recovery options for Exchange Online, the app does not have a workable backup feature that lets you recover emails after they have been deleted for over 30 days. Never fear, though. You can safely operate Exchange Online if you use it in tandem with CloudAlly’s Office 365 Exchange Backup.

Read on for more information about Office 365 Online’s backup issues, Microsoft’s built-in solutions for a few of these issues, and CloudAlly’s Office 365 Exchange Backup.

Limited Backup in Exchange Online

One of the major drawbacks of Exchange Online is that its mailboxes are not backed up in the Office 365 infrastructure. Microsoft does offer DAG technologies in two datacenters that provide a reseed/repair process if your data fails. But this is not enough. Data can be lost in multiple ways, which is why having multiple backup options is so important. Here are a few common ways emails can be lost:

• Human error
• Malicious activity
• Malware, spyware, or ransomware
• Incomplete data recovery systems
• Data corruption

Despite protests from Exchange administrators, Microsoft seems intent on sticking to its gun in not supporting Exchange Online mailboxes being backed up within the Office 365 infrastructure. Still, many administrators have lost essential information from databases that were improperly or infrequently backed up. Microsoft isn’t going to solve the problem or protect your data; so, what can you do to ensure that your company’s data is secure?

Microsoft’s Suggestions for Restoring Email in Office 365 Exchange

Microsoft has a few built-in recovery options in Exchange Online. Some are standard features, while others require you to modify the system settings yourself.

Single item recovery

You can restore a single missing item in Exchange Online without restoring an entire mailbox database. If the Managed Folder Assistant processes a Recoverable Items folder for a mailbox with only one item recovery, that item will not be purged in the Purges subfolder if its retention period (by default, deleted emails are stored for 14 days) has not already passed.

Deleted item retention

Office 365 Exchange lets you restore deleted emails for up to 14 days. But you can also tweak the settings to recover email that has been deleted for up to 30 days. Here’s how to do it.

1. Connect to Exchange Online’s PowerShell. To do this, enter the command $UserCredential = Get-Credential in the Windows PowerShell Credential Request dialog box. Click “OK.”
2. Next, run the following command: $Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection in the dialog box. Click “OK.”
3. Next, run the following command ConnectionUrivalue (https://partner.outlook.cn/PowerShell).
4. Finally, Run the following command: Import-PSSession $Session. You should now be connected to PowerShell.

5. You can choose to change only single users’ retention length. Say you are changing the retention length of a single user’s email. In this case, the user’s name is John Smith. Run the following command in the Exchange Management Shell: Set-Mailbox -Identity “John Smith” -RetainDeletedItemsFor 30 6. You can also change every user in your organization’s retention length by using the following command: Get-Mailbox -ResultSize unlimited -Filter {(RecipientTypeDetails -eq ‘UserMailbox’)} | Set-Mailbox -RetainDeletedItemsFor 30

Placing a mailbox on litigation hold

A litigation hold solution helps you recover email that has been in deleted items longer than 30 days. It is meant to be used as a one-off recovery solution, not one that is sustainable or very often usable. A litigation hold recovers all versions of a deleted email; you can also set a specific hold length. Here are the steps for a litigation hold in Exchange Online:

1. Enter PowerShell as described in Steps 1 through 4 above.
2. Navigate to “Recipients” and “Mailboxes.”
3. Choose the user mailbox that you want to put on litigation hold, and click “Edit.”
4. Click “Mailbox features” on the mailbox properties page.
5. Find “Litigation hold: Disabled” and click “Enable.”
6. You can then specify several features of your litigation hold, including “Litigation hold duration (days),” “Note” (which lets you notify a user that his or her mailbox is on litigation hold), and “URL” (to provide users more information about litigation holds).
7. Click “Save” on the litigation hold and again on the mailbox properties page.

Reasons Microsoft’s Backup Solutions Fall Short – “Cover Your Bases”

While Microsoft’s built-in solutions provide remedies to some issues with Exchange Online’s backup and recovery issues, these options are extremely limited and only solve a small number of problems that could arise. CloudAlly’s Office 365 Exchange Backup provides a complete and simple backup option. Instead of Microsoft’s limiting 30-day recovery time, Exchange that provides you with unlimited data storage and retention.

CloudAlly’s Office 365 Exchange Backup gives you piece of mind in backing up Exchange Online. But since there are so many ways that emails can be lost, it makes good sense to use as many backup options as possible. While Microsoft offers built-in backup options for Exchange Online, all these solutions are less complete than CloudAlly’s Exchange Backup. For complete safety, you may want to consider implementing Microsoft’s suggested backups and CloudAlly’s Exchange Backup when integrating Exchange Online into your company’s workflow.

Our Backup ensures that your Office 365 Exchange will be secured and recoverable, no matter what happens to your emails. In addition to email, Office 365 Exchange Backup backs up your contacts, calendar, and tasks so that even if something happens to this information, you’ll be able to retrieve it – and you can easily set up backup support for all your users. Exchange Backup automatically discovers new users, or lets you add new employees to the Backup manually.

Office 365 Exchange Backup backs up your data in two ways. The first backs up data so you can find emails lost at a certain time. From there, you can search for your missing email on a precise, specific level. The second backup allows you to export your Office 365 emails to be stored locally.

Ready to see what security feels like? Try our Office 365 Backup for free for 15 days.

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Q&A: Backing Up Your G Suite Apps, with CloudAlly’s G Suite Backup

Google’s G-Suite is only able to protect your data on the company’s end, meaning that if Google loses your information – say, in a disk failure – they will be able to recover it. On your end, though, if you lose data, you need third-party backup program like CloudAlly’s G Suite Backup. This limited in-built recovery in G Suite means that if you intend to adopt the program, you need to first consider how to backup Google apps. Here, we’ll answer some of your most pressing questions about backing up your G Suite Apps.

Is data loss really a significant problem for companies?

According to a recent study from Dell EMC, many companies worldwide are failing to implement the necessary levels of data protection, backup, and recovery. In the past twelve months, 52% of companies faced unplanned downtime and 29% suffered from data loss.

Why does G-Suite need a third-party backup?

Here are just a few of the reasons you need to back up your G-Suite apps:

• Ransomware (which has seen a 3,500% increase in the last few years)
• Phishing attempts
• Accidental deletion – in a recent survey, accidental deletions accounted for 41% of data loss on SaaS applications
• Migration errors – in the same study, 31% of users said a migration error caused them to lose their data
• Mistaken overwrites – another problem accounting for 26% of data loss on SaaS applications with insufficient data backup

How can I download my data from G-Suite?

Google gives users the options to export their data and download it later. Be aware, though, this option only gives you a static collection of data on the date of the export. The database compiled will not continue to be updated as users’ data is updated. You can lead your employees through the following steps:

1. Head to Google’s “Download your data” page and sign into your Google Account.
2. Choose the G Suite apps you want included in the download.
3. Click on “Next.”
4. Select the file type in which you want the archive’s information to be stored.
5. Choose “Send download link via email” as your Delivery method.
6. Select “Create archive.”
7. You will then receive an email with a link to your archive. Depending on the size of the archive created, you will receive your archive length within minutes up to a few hours.
8. If you want to access the archive, click “Download archive” and follow the instructions.

How can I restore Gmail and Drive Data?

As an administrator, you can restore lost data (except for email drafts or data from the Trash) for up to 10 users in Gmail and/or Google Drive. Be aware, though, this method of data recovery only works on data deleted within the last 25 days. Here’s how to do restore data for multiple users:

1. Log onto your Google Admin console using your administrator account.
2. Navigate to the “Users” page.
3. Click the box next to all the users whose data you want to restore; you can click up to 10 users’ boxes.
4. Click “More” on the toolbar.
5. Click “Restore data.”
6. Set the date range for the data you want to restore, up to 25 days.
7. Select if you want to restore data from Drive or Gmail.
8. Click “Restore data.”

How can I scan email traffic using data loss prevention?

If you have G Suite Enterprise, you can set predefined detectors that help support a data loss protection policy. These detectors are culled from public information. Google provides a list of predefined detectors that you can set up in your email traffic scan. Here are a few options:

• Checksum offers computation and verification with a check digit.
• Word or phrase list lets you match a whole phrase or part of a phrase to a word or phrase found in a dictionary.
• Pattern match recognizes alphanumeric patterns that include range checks, valid position, and delimiters.
• Context matches strings in relation to a checksum matching string, pattern, or both.

While these options provide solutions to certain problems with G Suite apps, they do not provide a simple, complete way to back up and restore user data. To secure G Suite, you need to use a third-party backup app: CloudAlly’s G Suite Backup.

Why do I need a third-party backup for G-Suite?

One of the biggest problems with Google apps is that users can only save deleted emails and other data for a maximum of 60 days. After that, the data is lost forever. In contrast, G Suite Backup gives you unlimited storage length – you can keep your data forever. Additionally, another drawback of G-Suite is that each user only has 30 MB of storage for all their data, including emails, photos, and files. CloudAlly’s G Suite Backup, in contrast, gives users unlimited storage.

If you are already a fan of G-Suite or intend on adopting G-Suite for your business, we aren’t asking you to reconsider. Instead, we suggest opting for the backup protection of a third-party software provider like CloudAlly. CloudAlly’s G Suite Backup provides backup and support for all G Suite apps, including often-used apps like Gmail, Calendar, and Google Drive.

What is unique about G Suite Backup?

G Suite Backup lets you recover information without overwriting any changes you may have made after the recovery time. This non-destructive recovery lets you search for time-specific data and recover it – without worrying that users will lose later drafts of the same files.

Another unique feature is that users can quickly export and access their data on an alternate device. G Suite allows for the export archived data in multiple formats, including EML, VCF and ICS, and in PST format for Outlook.

How does G Suite Backup protect data for multiple users?

For G Suite Backup to be fully functional for business use, it needs to be able to detect multiple users. And it can. CloudAlly can detect new users at your company, and from their first sign-on, can back up their data. If you would like to be in control of user management, too, CloudAlly gives you the option to manually control the addition and deletion of users.

What about pricing for G Suite Backup? 

G Suite is available for $3/month per user or $30/year per user plans. If you’re curious about G Suite Backup, but want to test its functionality before purchasing, try it out first with our 15-day free trial.

The post Q&A: Backing Up Your G Suite Apps with CloudAlly’s G Suite Backup appeared first on CloudAlly.

Does Your Company Use Office 365?

Make Sure You Follow These Tips to Prevent Data Loss

There’s a lot of buzz surrounding the use of the cloud in recent years. Cloud computing increases a business’ efficiency, it helps reduce overhead costs, enables companies to be more flexible and it supports collaboration as well as communication. But what about data loss in the cloud?

With a reliable cloud-based solution in place, it means employees don’t necessarily have to be physically present in the office to be productive. Teams can be scattered all over the world and still be able to work as efficiently as they would if they were in the same brick-and-mortar office.

With all this functionality, it’s almost surprising to find out that there’s one aspect of enterprise cloud solutions that remains especially vulnerable–data loss.

Take the popular Software as a Service (SaaS) platform, Office 365, as an example. Being one of the more prominent cloud collaboration tools, you would assume that any data that gets deleted on it–for whatever reason–can be easily retrieved. But you’d be wrong. Unfortunately, Office 365 doesn’t protect users against data loss due to malicious attacks or user error. This is particularly worrying given that a study conducted by Aberdeen Group clearly illustrates the rise of cloud adoption among businesses. According to their research, 80 percent of respondents say that some form of SaaS application is now being used in their companies. And 32 percent say that they have experienced SaaS data loss in their own organization in some form. In fact,  CSO from IDG notes that data breaches and accidental deletion are among the top 12 cloud security threats for 2017.

With these in mind, implementing actionable measures to reduce your vulnerability is essential. Because the reality is, the convenience comes at the expense of your data. Protecting your data–whether from malicious attacks or admin carelessness–is in your hands. And it starts by knowing what actionable steps you can take–

With that in mind, here are 5 ways you can avoid data loss in Office 365.

1. Ensure all mobile devices that access the platform are secure

It’s likely that your company uses both company-issued and personal devices to access work email, contacts, calendar, and other important data. In fact, MarketsandMarkets surveyed bring-your-own-device (BYOD) trends for 2017 and notes a 36 percent rise at the start of 2017.  This number is even expected to jump to 50 percent at the start of 2018.

Given this, make sure that your team is able to implement and follow the company’s security policies carefully. Adding a feature that allows you to remotely protect proprietary information from malicious deletion or attacks is critical given how often data breaches happen today.

2. Implement multi-factor authentication for users

Malicious attacks today are getting more and more sophisticated. A single password—even one that uses a mix of upper and lower case letter, punctuation marks, and numbers—won’t be enough to keep data stored in Office 365 safe. It’s always better to be safe than sorry, so it’s best to enable multi-factor authentication to make it more difficult for hackers to access your account.

3. Avoid anonymous calendar sharing

One of the most useful features of Office 365 is its ability to share calendar information easily.

While it may seem like an innocuous feature unrelated to data breaches or loss, publicly sharing data can expose critical information about your business that would leave your company vulnerable to attacks. Hackers can use your schedules to determine how your company operates and identify which users are most vulnerable.

4. Establish role-based controls

Accessibility is one of the key advantages of Office 365. Be sure however to limit access to critical data. Carefully determine which users should and shouldn’t have access to specific files and features in your company. Talk to each department and coordinate with them to determine who should have access to what to minimize potential data leaks or loss.

5. Automate backups for your system

Office 365 unfortunately still only relies on the trash bin for data recovery. If someone hacks into your data, accidentally empties the bin, or maliciously destroys data, all your important data is gone forever. Implementing online data backups and disaster recovery will ensure that you have an archive of all your data, which you can recover if the need arises.

Office 365 has proven to be an essential tool for businesses today. But being responsible for the security of your company’s data means you have to be aware of the security risks you face while using it. To make sure that you protect your data from potential data loss, so get started with your free trial.

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What is Your Business Email Backup Policy?

Without an email backup policy, businesses are exposed to significant liabilities. As a primary means of enterprise communication, email plays a vital role in any business, and the security challenges that go along with maintaining these communications channels are important to an overall security plan.

To be fully effective, however, an email backup policy needs to be “vibrant.” It needs to consist of a set of universal protocols, taking into account the specific needs of the business and the structure of the enterprise network.

Quick and Easy Data Access

One of the major principles that a business runs on is access to information. However, the quality and extent of access is ultimately important. Having real-time access to data is more valuable than having delayed access – and having a good email backup policy promotes the enhanced access that serves so many business processes.

One reason to have an email backup policy, and backup and restore services, is that the default settings of any major email provider may not allow for certain important kinds of automated retrieval. Limitations on inherent access may consist of a “days supported” disclaimer, or have to do with the speed of retrieval. A robust email backup policy goes beyond these generic limitations to offer a business more functionality and more agility.

Email Platform Limitations

Looking critically at some of these platform limitation provides an illustration of how email providers handle backups. For example, consider the 30-day period in which Microsoft maintains deleted data in Outlook, or daily backup data limits in Gmail, which is another popular way to set up business email accounts. These caveats can be important in an overall plan to serve business communications, and a sticking point if something goes wrong.

External data backup services will take any of those limitations and extend the protection of email data beyond them — securing all of the data, for any time frame that’s required.

Preparing for Outlier Scenarios

One of the biggest advantages of having an external email backup policy has to do with contingency planning. Employee turnover introduces an element of chaos to a business model. At the same time, companies need to “circle the wagons” against all manner of hackers and black hat malicious actors who seek to inject harmful malware into a system.

In these types of situations, having full backup and restore capability is vital. Any kind of limitation or gap can really hurt a business when it comes to getting over critical difficulties and maintaining operations in an emergency.

Cloudally’s backup services help businesses to use Microsoft or Google, or any type of enterprise tools, in safe ways — allowing executives to have confidence that everything that they put into business communications is secure in a comprehensive backup platform. Take a look at our subscription pricing and what we offer our clients in terms of comprehensive backups for Office 365, G Suite, Salesforce information, SharePoint and OneDrive data, and much more.

Microsoft Email Backup Rentantion Policy Video:

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Introducing Our Box.com Backup Video

Box.com is a cloud storage solution that allows you to get access to your files anywhere, on any device. It’s an amazing tool that enables you to share your content and work together with anyone in your work and life. No matter where you are or what you’re doing, Box.com makes it easy to access and share your files and photos for seamless communication and collaboration in your personal life and business.

There’s just one challenge, with endless collaboration opportunities, you open yourself up to potentially problematic situations. For example, what if one of you delete a document and empty the recycle bin, by mistake? That’s where a cloud backup and restore solution is key to your business’ success.  Box.com data can be accidentally or maliciously deleted or corrupted, and is vulnerable to ransom-ware attacks.

You can’t afford to lose file and documents that are vital to your entire organization without a way to recover it. The good news is that, in just a few minutes, you can set up CloudAlly box.com backup to protect your data with automated daily backups, and the ability to restore your files.

CloudAlly’s box.com backup solution is compatible with all business plans. No matter how many employees are in your organization or how much data you create and modify on a daily basis, CloudAlly can protect your company data with a backup solution hosted in secure Amazon S3 storage. And as an added benefit, CloudAlly gives you the ability to keep track of all your Box.com backup activity. So, you can see exactly what’s going on.

About Our Box.com Backup Video Demo 

In our newest demo video, we show you how easy it is to start protecting Box.com data for your company. Activating your CloudAlly backup is simple, safe, and can be completed in just a few easy-to-follow steps. You’ll notice how user-friendly our software is as well as how many options you have for customizing your backup solution.

Let our two-minute activation video take you through the step-by-step process of backing up your Box.com cloud storage solution, so you can sit back and relax knowing that your data is safe and that you can restore like an expert.

And if you’re still concerned about using CloudAlly’s OneDrive backup solution, don’t forget, we have a risk free 15-day trial available! We want to show you how easy it is to protect your data from all threats no matter the problem.

Don’t choose software to protect your data that you haven’t seen in action. Choose CloudAlly as your Box.com backup and restore solution, and rest easy knowing that you’ve already seen how it works and don’t have to worry about hidden processes or errors.

When you’re ready to know more, contact CloudAlly by calling +1.917.338.0385 or filling out our Contact Form. We can’t wait to work with you to keep your Box.com data safe and sound.

The post Box.com Cloud Storage Solution appeared first on CloudAlly.

Dropbox Business Backup

Dropbox Business  is a powerful and useful product in the content collaboration platforms arena.  In fact, Gartner names Dropbox Business as a Leader in the July 2018 Magic Quadrant for Content Collaboration Platforms.

In their own words Dropbox Business “…simplifies your work, with a central place to access and share files,” hence this is one of the main features & benefits, which has positioned Dropbox as a leading cloud business solution for storing and collaborating on content.

We at CloudAlly recognize the significance of this Dropbox business backup solution, and have now introduced industry’s first enterprise-grade, cloud-to-cloud backup & restore solution for Dropbox business plan.

Our new service ensures the ability to quickly recover critical data stored within Dropbox in the event of data loss, as a result of malware, accidental deletion, and other occurrences where imperative business content has to be recovered.  

Company CIOs and IT managers who rely primarily on the Dropbox Recycle folder simply risk data loss occurrences, since this folder is automatically purged after 120 days. Once purged, the data is gone forever, without the ability to restore.

Avi Katz, CloudAlly CEO recently explained; “Dropbox is yet another leading secure file sharing and storage solution for Businesses, and CloudAlly is committed to providing its customers & partners with a Dropbox for Business enterprise grade cloud to cloud backup solution.”   

CloudAlly’s automated daily backup of Dropbox folders & files enables businesses to quickly recover data from any point in time, ensuring complete protection of your important Dropbox data.

The CloudAlly backup solution includes backup for other leading business solutions like Box.com, Office 365, Sharepoint/OneDrive, G Suite, etc.

*Footnote: Dropbox recycle bin stores your data (after a file is deleted) for 120 days only if you have a Professional or Business account. If you have permanently delete it, without Cloudally 3rd party cloud-to-cloud backup solution, recovery will not be possible. Link to Dropbox Instructions.

Get started on your 14 day free trial, with CloudAlly Dropbox Business Backup Solution.

More information is available about our Dropbox backup solution.

Need Enterprise or None Profit Pricing? Click Here

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Cloud Backup and Recovery Software Solutions for Business in 2018

Your business data is incredibly valuable. According to research by IBM, global devices generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. So, there’s no denying that data is crucial for running your business, making key decisions, and demonstrating your value and success to shareholders. Without data, you’re dead in the water and as an IT manager or CIO, it’s one of your main responsibilities.

backup and recovery software

This is a major problem considering the prevalence of data loss. 70 percent of business people have experienced (or will experience) data loss due to accidental deletion, disk or system failure, viruses, fire, or another disaster. Worse yet, 60% of companies that lose their data shut down within six months, according to Boston Computing Network’s Data Loss Statistics.

So, what can your business do to protect itself? As the IT manager or CIO, your first step is to implement a backup and recovery software solution. This precaution ensures that when data loss occurs, you can quickly react and get your data back.

Backup and recovery software in the cloud has transformed the way businesses backup, restore, and manage their data. Cloud backup for business is essential for effective enforcement of the disaster recovery process, allowing businesses to ensure complete data security while offering access to data from anywhere in the world.

The question is, “what are the best business backup solutions?” First, let’s take a look at what makes a solid cloud backup and recovery software.

Questions to Ask About Your: Backup and Recovery Software

Before you rush out and set up a dozen different backup and recovery solutions for your business, you need to know what to look for. Not every solution is made the same way or offers the same services. In fact, some tools might leave you out of luck if the worst should happen and your data is lost.

So, what’s essential to backup and recovery software that you can count on? Here are the questions every IT manager and CIO should ask:

1. How is the data backed up? The solution you use should be configured with RAID, which ensures that your data is duplicated on redundant independent disks in case something should go wrong. This creates a fail-safe in case of disk failure.
2. Does it offer a snapshot? Snapshot storage backup takes a photo of your computer hard drive at a moment in time, which allows you to restore a full, partial, file, or even differential database backup.
3. How secure is the backup? Your data should always remain encrypted at the source with at least a minimal SSL encryption. Make sure your business backup solution makes your privacy one of their top priorities.
4. How long are your backups stored? Most backup and recovery providers have retention policies. For example, some companies might keep a backup for 30 days and delete the oldest version on the 31^st day, or they might hold your backup for six months to a year.
5. What type of support is offered? Support should be a heavily weighted factor when it comes to your backup and recovery software Since this software touches almost every aspect of your data, you don’t want a vendor that isn’t available with the best technical support and training.
6. What type of environment is supported? Your data backup and recovery solution should support various EOSs, SaaS (G Suite, Office 365, Salesforce), and environments (VMware).
7. Does it use the cloud? Cloud backup for business offers the most effective, long-term, and cost-effective backup and recovery solution available.

Now that you know what to look for in your next backup and recovery software, it’s time to take a look at the various offerings out there.

Default: Cloud Backup for Business

There are many default cloud backup for business services that you can use alongside your day-to-day SaaS. These services are provided for free alongside the application/software and require little to no extra input or work on your side. This can help save you in a crunch when you haven’t had the opportunity or time to purchase a separate backup and recovery solution.

Because these backups are in the cloud and sound comprehensive at first glance, many IT managers and CIOs believe they are fully protected and backed up. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Since these services are not 100% dedicated to backing up your data, they offer limited features or characteristics.

For example, most of these default services are missing:

• Unlimited storage and retention
• An immutable archive that can’t be altered or deleted
• Point-in-time recovery
• One-click restore
• Cross-user restoration
• Export capabilities
• Auto-activation of backups

Let’s take a look at exactly what each of the most popular applications offer for default backup and how they’re lacking.

Office 365 Exchange: Backup and Recovery Software

If you use Office 365 Exchange, you already have basic data protection and industry-leading security measures that come with everyday use. Even so, research shows that data loss can still be a concern when using Office 365 even though it has many backup policies in place.

In Office 365, you have a recoverable items folder that can hold items for up to 30 days (14 days is the default), but any item after this length is purged. And if you accidentally purge items before the 30-day time limit, the items are unrecoverable. Beyond this, Office 365 is fairly limited.

“With all the previously mentioned options for deleted item recovery, note that point-in-time restoration of mailbox items is out of the scope of the Exchange service.” —MS Technet Documentation

Unfortunately, Office 365 cannot guarantee a complete and speedy restoration of lost data. It does not offer daily backups and archiving to restore data automatically, neither does it offer point-in-time restore. This makes Office 365 a completely manual backup and recovery tool.

Another issue is what type of data and backup Office 365 considers its responsibility. Office 365 does not protect against data corruption caused by 3^rd party applications, unexpected malicious activity, or human error.

SharePoint Cloud Backup

SharePoint offers simplified backup and recovery services through the central administration website. These tools support data loss in the case of unintentional deletion or versioning, moving data between installations or hardware or software upgrade, and unexpected failure. There are only two options to recover data in SharePoint: the recycle bin and version history.

Unfortunately, this means that SharePoint does not offer automatic daily backups, point-in-time snapshots, or data recovery due to corruption or other errors. This makes it very limited for a backup and recovery software.

“You can complete backup and recovery operations by using the SharePoint Central Administration website or PowerShell cmdlets. Note that some built-in backup and recovery tools may not meet all the requirements of your organization.” — Microsoft Administration Docs

G Suite: Business Backup Solutions

G Suite has a few safeguards in place to protect your account from data loss, in particular, Google’s Data Loss Prevention feature. While this is valuable for keeping your files from being lost, it only protects you from hackers or hardware malfunction. It does not protect you from irreversible data loss due to human error, missteps in syncing, or deliberate deletion of files.

To restore lost files through G Suite, you can use Google Vault to restore lost data as an export/import function. Or you can use Google’s built-in restore feature, which allows you to restore everything or nothing at all—you can’t just choose one file. Other than that, Google limits their cloud backup for business.

“You have a limited time from when the data was permanently deleted to restore files and messages. After that, the data is gone forever.” —G Suite Administrator Help

Salesforce Backup

Salesforce is a massive SaaS solution that contains some of the most valuable data and information belonging to your company. For many businesses, it serves as the infrastructure for success and so its protection is vital.

To use the default Salesforce data protection, the system administrator must perform a time-consuming, on-site manual backup on a weekly basis. If this manual backup is skipped or forgotten, it can result in data loss as a result of accidental or malicious data deletion or data corruption. There’s no such thing as automatic or on-demand business backup solution within Salesforce.

However, if the worst should happen and you need to recover lost data that you didn’t manually backup, Salesforce can help with an expensive and time-consuming manual recovery service that costs $10,000 and takes six to eight weeks to complete. This means you can’t just go back and find a single file that was lost or request metadata only. It’s all of nothing and it costs an arm and a leg.

“Salesforce maintains a copy of customer data for disaster recovery purposes, but it is important for customers to develop a data backup and recovery strategy as part of their overall data management and security model. The Salesforce Data Recovery service is an expensive and time-consuming process and should only be used as a last resort, when no other copy of the data is available.” —Salesforce Knowledge Article

In addition, Salesforce only saves files for a maximum of 90 days; after that time, it’s gone forever.

Dropbox Recovery and Backup

With Dropbox, you can recover deleted files instantly and restore previous versions of your work. The application works like a time machine that keeps snapshots of every change in your Dropbox folder, forever. This can make it easy to recover and restore deleted files right on the Dropbox website or to go back to a previous version of a file in case of damage or deletion.

Unfortunately, Dropbox’s backup solutions for business still do not protect from accidental or malicious file destruction. If your Dropbox trash folder has been purged, your data is gone and there’s no getting it back.

“Deleted files are marked for deletion in our system and our purged from our storage servers. They can no longer be recovered.” — Dropbox for Business Help Center Portal

Box Cloud Backup

While Box is a powerful file storage and collaboration platform, its abilities are limited in terms of backup and recovery. While you can securely backup your files in case your device malfunctions or you accidentally delete an important file, the solution does not protect from accidental or malicious destruction of files. If the trash is emptied, it’s gone for good.

“There is a 14-day grace period when content is removed from Trash during which User Services can recover your content. After this, we cannot guarantee that the files or folders will be recoverable.” —Box.com Community Help Portal

Cloud-to-Cloud Backup

Now, if you want to take your backup and recovery solutions to the next level, you need to consider cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery software. Cloud-to-cloud-backup allows you to protect all of your SaaS data using a single third-party software that simplifies the entire backup and recovery process.

And by backing up in the cloud, you have access to your data no matter where you’re located in the world. Plus, you’ll have lower hardware costs, and backups can run automatically without manual intervention.

CloudAlly: Backup Solutions for Business

CloudAlly is a cloud-to-cloud backup for business service that keeps all of your SaaS data in one place. It automatically backs up your data from G Suite, Office 365 Exchange, SharePoint/OneDrive, Box.com, Salesforce, and more all within one easy-to-use solution. This means that if something catastrophic happens, you don’t have to go into each of your applications and software solutions to recover what you need.

CloudAlly also ticks all the answers to the questions we told you to ask about a proper backup and recovery software.

1. How is the data backed up? CloudAlly backup is safe—ISO 27001 certified, GDPR compliant, and HIPPA compliant.
2. Does it offer a snapshot? CloudAlly offers point-in-time restoration so that you can easily recover data at any time.
3. How secure is the backup? CloudAlly uses Amazon S3 Secure Storage and AES-256 Encryption.
4. How long are your backups stored? CloudAlly offers unlimited archive retention with no deletion time or date.
5. What type of support is offered? CloudAlly offers 24/7 customer support for all customers.
6. What type of environment is supported? You can backup Office 365, G Suite, Salesforce, and more using CloudAlly.
7. Does it use the cloud? CloudAlly not only stores your backup in the cloud for quick and easy access, it also allows you to specify an archive location for quicker backup times.

When you use CloudAlly you never have to worry about lost or corrupt data. With automatic daily backup, point-in-time recovery, quick search features, non-destructive restores, and export potential, it’s an all-in-one data backup and recovery tool going forward into 2019.

The post Cloud Backup for Business appeared first on CloudAlly.

Leading Cloud Storage Options and Online Backup Services for Business in 2019

Businesses are increasingly relying on online backup services to protect their data (online backup services for business, is crucial for DR). That’s because most companies already store much of their data in the cloud or use cloud-based software such as Google Drive or Office 365 to run their business. So cloud storage options make sense.

Cloud storage especially makes sense when you consider that global devices generate 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. That’s a lot of vital information that your company can’t afford to lose due to hard drive failures (140,000 a week), cyber attacks (31% of businesses have experienced a cyber attack), or poorly planned disaster recovery (68% of SMBs have no plan in place).

So, the need for some type of data backup in the cloud compared to in-house, on-premise local storage is ideal. The problem is figuring out which cloud backup companies offer the type of online storage options your business needs. There are a multitude of providers out there, and you have to wisely choose the option with the best ROI.

To help your business out, this article will take an in-depth look at what the leading cloud storage options for business offer and what your business needs to consider carefully before making the jump.

Why You Need: Online Backup Services for Business

First, let’s talk about why you need online backup services. While you might think that your tools, applications, and software are protected thanks to the backup and recovery built into most SaaS products, the reality is different.

Default cloud storage options are typically limited and not designed to fully protect your business. These online backup services exist to help you out in a tight spot when data is accidentally dropped in the recycle bin or your system shuts down unexpectedly, but they are definitely not a replacement for complete online backup services for business.

Let’s take a deeper look at what these FREE or low-cost cloud backup companies offer.

Leading FREE or Low-Cost: Cloud Storage Options for Business

When considering your cloud storage options, the first place you’ll probably start is with the default online backup services associated with your favorite SaaS applications.

Office 365 Exchange Backup and Recovery Software

• Easy to Use
• Integrated into Microsoft 365
• Only 100GB default storage
• 30-day recovery limit

Office 365 comes with basic data protection and security measures for every day use. This means that you can recover items for up to 30 days when using the recycle bin, and it works neatly with Widows users and quite a few mobile apps.

However, Office 365 Exchange is limited when it comes to cloud storage options. If data is purged, the data is unrecoverable. It also does not include point-in-time restore nor does it consider data corruption caused by 3^rd party applications, unexpected malicious activity, or human error its problem.

There’s also a problem when it comes to outages. Recently, Office 365 went down for four hours and that’s not the only time the company has gone offline. They’ve had major outages fives times in the last 12 months.

Price: 100GB free.

Learn more about the default Office 365 Exchange backup here.

SharePoint Cloud Backup

• Simplified data backup and recovery
• No automated daily backups or point-in-time snapshots

SharePoint offers simple cloud storage for business through the central administration website. Data loss in the case of unintentional deletion or versioning, moving data between installations or hardware or software upgrade, and unexpected failure are all supported.

However, SharePoint cloud storage for business does not offer automatic daily backups, point-in-time snapshots, or data recovery due to corruption or other errors.

Price: 1TB per user for $5.00/month. Unlimited for $10.00 per user/month.

Learn more about SharePoint backup in the cloud here.

G Suite Business Backup Solutions

• 15GB free storage
• Integrates seamlessly with Android devices
• Web interface is lacking and not easy to use
• Limited data loss protection

G-Suite drive backup is a natural choice for Android users and those who use the online application. It comes with a generous 15GB of free storage including the ability to save high definition photos on the companion app Google Photos. G-Suite also has safeguards in place to protect your account from data loss through Google’s Data Loss Prevention feature. This is valuable for keeping your files from being lost, and protects you from hackers and hardware malfunction.

You can use Google Vault to restore lost data as an export/import function, or you can use Google’s built-in restore feature, which allows you to restore everything or nothing at all—you can’t just choose one file. However, G Suite’s online backup services do not protect you from irreversible data loss due to human error, missteps in syncing, or deliberate deletion of files, in fact the most needed feature is a point-in-time restore which can only be provided by a 3^rd party backup vendor such as CloudAlly.com.

Price: 15GB free. 100GB for $1.99/month. 200GB for $2.99/month. 2TB for $9.99/month. 10TB for $99.99/month.

Learn more about G-Suite cloud storage for business here.

Salesforce Backup

• Limited default data protection
• Expensive and time-consuming manual data recovery
• Data deleted after 90 days

Salesforce contains some of the most valuable data and information belonging to your company but it comes with a very limited default backup in the cloud. Unfortunately, to use this data backup, the system administrator must perform a time-consuming, on-site manual backup on a weekly basis. There is no such thing as automatic or on-demand cloud storage for business within Salesforce, or point-int-time restore with an unlimited retention period.

And if the worst should happen and you need to recover lost data that you didn’t manually backup, it costs $10,000 and takes six to eight weeks to get your data back. It’s all or nothing. Worse yet, Salesforce only saves files for 90 days before they’re gone forever.

Price: Manual backup included free but data recovery fee of $10,000.

Learn more about Salesforce’s data online backup services here.

Dropbox Recovery and Backup

• Supported by multiple platforms
• Includes many unique features
• Easy-to-use
• Limited to 2GB of space initially

Dropbox is one of the most popular free cloud storage options around. Its web interface is easy to use and streamlined. Unfortunately, it also comes with one of the least generous free packages available—just 2GB for new users.

With Dropbox, you can recover deleted files instantly and restore previous versions of your work. The application works like a time machine that keeps snapshots of every change in your Dropbox folder, making it easy to recover and restore data and/or return to a previous version of a file. It’s also a highly collaborative tool that works well with Windows, Mac, and Linux plus a variety of mobile apps on Android, iOS, and Kindle.

Unfortunately, Dropbox’s backup in the cloud doesn’t protect from accidental or malicious file destruction. Once data has been purged, there’s no getting it back. No Point-int-time restore availability, no unlimited retention period, no restore support.

Price: 2GB free. 1TB for $8.25/month. 2TB for $16.58/month.

Learn more about Dropbox’s cloud storage for business here.

Box Cloud Backup

• Supported by a wide range of apps
• Business plans include advanced security features
• Free accounts limited to 250MB upload
• No backup once trash is emptied

Box.com is one of those cloud backup companies that has been around for a while. It’s supported by a number of apps including Google Docs and Office 365 and it’s also integrated with G-Suite, which means all of your docs, sheets, and slides can be automatically saved and managed with Box. In addition Box Sync client is available for Mac, Windows, and Android.

While you can securely backup your files with Box in case your device malfunctions or you accidentally delete an important file, the solution does not protect from accidental or malicious destruction of files. If the trash is emptied, it’s gone for good. Plus, you only get 10GB of storage for free, otherwise you have to sign up for a business plan.

Price: 10GB free or 100GB for around $10/month.

Learn more about Box here.

The Best Cloud to Cloud Backup Companies

So, what are the best cloud storage options for business in 2019? It comes down to understanding your highly complex business needs when it comes to data backup and recovery. Instead of using one of the tools we outlined above, which limits your online backup services to a single SaaS application, you need a solution that covers all of your bases at once.

CloudAlly Cloud Storage for Business

• Strong security
• Central SaaS data management
• End-to-end encryption
• Several packages available
• Excellent integration
• Easy to use interface
• Point-in-time recovery
• Automated backups for all users
• User-specified archive locations in the US, Canada, EU, and AU
• Unlimited archive retention

CloudAlly is a cloud-to-cloud data backup and recovery solution that keeps all of your data in one strategic location instead of using the default cloud storage options for G Suite, Office 365 Exchange, Salesforce, SharePoint, Dropbox, and Box.com. It handles all of your cloud storage for business and provides centralized unlimited storage, automated daily backups, and flexible archive locations for the ultimate in data retention.

With CloudAlly you get:

• Internationally recognized accreditation for information security management including industry-standard OAuth, Amazon S3 Storage with AES-256-bit encryption, ISO 27001 compliance, and HIPAA compliance.
• Point-in-time recovery options that allow you to restore your entire system or single file back to its original location and format.
• Cloud-to-cloud backup and recovery for multiple SaaS applications (Office 365 Exchange, Dropbox, Box.com, Salesforce, etc.) in one central location.
• Automated daily backups and snapshot storage that is archived forever.
• One platform to manage all of your daily backup activity including reviewing new and current users, exporting data, and restoring files.
• Non-destructive restore options for quick and convenient access to all of your data.

When you use CloudAlly you never have to worry about lost or corrupt data. With automatic daily backup, point-in-time recovery, quick search features, non-destructive restores, and export potential, it’s one of the best cloud storage options for business in 2019.

Price: Free 15-day trial version. Unlimited archive retention $30 per year/per user.

Learn more about CloudAlly’s online backup services for business here.

The post Online Backup Services For Business, in 2019 appeared first on CloudAlly.

Google G Suite Drive Needs a backup & restore solution

Is Google Drive’s Backup & Sync a Viable Recovery Tool?

CIOs relying on Google Apps will have to go beyond G Suite Backup & Sync to protect their employees’ data continuity.

G suite’s competitive business solution offer is the interoperability of its apps – not the feature-richness of any app. For some apps, missing niche functions can be corrected by simple add-ons. In the case of Google Drive’s new Backup & Sync, missing support for key use-cases can spell disaster for businesses caught unaware of the missing functions.  Google apps drive backup, is the most essential business solution app to adopt for business in 2019.

 Why effective data backup isn’t as simple as it used to be

The possibility of a crash for cloud-hosted data is extremely low. Like all major providers, Google replicates data across multiple data centers in order to reduce single-point-of-failure risk, thereby mitigating the effects of fire or flood damage. Their   relationship with world governments also keeps their data assets insulated from seizure. However, if businesses are worried only about these disaster scenarios, it would be enough to have their data saved both on and off-cloud.

But a modern backup solution does more than replicate data on yet another external drive. In fact, the need for data recovery arises from business maneuvers more often than act-of-god crashes. Human error, structural changes, security breaches and ransomware — all these challenges can leave a data manager with some potentially uncomfortable questions:

• “When was the data in the state we need it?”
• “How can we ensure the data hasn’t been tampered?”
• “Where does the data need to be recovered to?”
• “In what format do we need the data recovered?”

 Businesses require a backup solution that can meet complex recovery scenarios.

Let’s start with the basics – what can GSuite offer in terms of backup?

First, Backup & Sync is a computer-to-cloud service. This means that whether you are making changes to your files on the cloud or on your computer, Backup & Sync will retain and mirror changes onto both versions.

Documents, photos, and folders of your choosing are all up for grabs with Backup & Sync. It retains a cloud copy of whatever folders you select on your local computer, and updates changes automatically. However, despite its title as a ‘Backup’ service, the fact that ‘Sync’ propagates changes across all devices means that deletions and/or hacks will be synchronized as well. “While your data is always available, it’s not necessarily safer,” Kris Hogh, executive at Shoosh Monkey.

In some cases, one can turn to Google Vault, which . It is an archival service which lets enterprises set retention rules for what data to retain and allows them to search through this content, if it has passed through Google’s main apps.

Chiefly, you can use Vault’s export function to restore a user’s Gmail, but you can also do full restores of a user’s Drive contents. So if an employee deletes their entire local & cloud data by mistake (or by malice), it is possible to use G Suite to recover the cloud based data – within a maximum 25 day period. This full restore, however, does not let you select individual files to restore, and is instead a complete overwrite of current files.

Drive File Stream is a collaborative alternative to Backup & Sync which places a more strict emphasis on the cloud. All user data is kept on-cloud, and teams share and edit the same files.

While it allows an individual user to make offline copies of items manually, any further changes made offline will not be reflected back in the cloud. It is not a backup solution strictly speaking, as offline copies are overwritten upon reconnection to the cloud.

What is CloudAlly doing for data recovery that G Suite cannot do?

As alluded to, Google has yet to provide a robust backup solution that compares to specialized recovery software providers. When IT professionals choose a SaaS backup service provider like CloudAlly, they’re covering for one or more must-have functions absent from Google Drive’s default backup apps.

These functions include:

1. Unlimited storage and retention of backups. Google uses a rollover system of 25 day retention for any deleted data, informing users that they “have a limited time from when the data was permanently deleted to restore files and messages. After that, the data is gone forever.” Specialized backup providers will at least provide options for long-term retention of backups at set intervals (though few will offer unlimited backup retention at daily intervals like CloudAlly).
2. Point-in-time recovery. Retrieving Gmail or Drive data from a particular ‘snapshot’ is possible within Google’s 25 day retention period. However, this full restore will overwrite the present state of the user’s Gmail or Drive. By comparison, CloudAlly allows selective and non-destructive recovery of any data, from any point in time.
3. Immutable archive. By design, users with permission to work with files through Backup & Sync or Drive File Stream are able to change and delete every instance of those files. While some GSuite Apps have revision history functions for files that have only been altered (as opposed to deleted), recovering proper versions must be done manually and one-at-a-time. Backups made through Cloudally are encrypted and  protected from accidental or malicious tampering.
4. Cross-user restore. When Google users were left with a choice between Backup & Sync and Drive File Stream. This put a wedge between the files preserved on an individual’s local computer and files preserved in a shared cloud workspace. In one use-case, should an employee leave and an administrator would want to restore their local data to another user, GSuite has no simple solution. This cross-user restore is provided by CloudAlly’s service.
5. Export in Outlook compatible .pst format. A function that can range from niche to necessary depending on your circumstances. Businesses using migration tools to transition to Outlook can rely on Cloudally backups to ensure their archives can be restored into the proper format when needed.

CloudAlly provides a GSuite backup, as it does for Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, and more. Get your data continuity is protected on Amazon AWS and enable point in time restore.

The post Google Apps Drive Backup appeared first on CloudAlly.

Loss of cloud data

Loss of data on the cloud can occur for many reasons. A perfect example why business should backup their cloud data applications such as Microsoft Office 365, G Suite, and such … because you can afford to lose your personal cloud stored on 3rd party solutions data, but not your business data.

A recent example of loss of personal data (and business if you’re an artist).

Some IT managers and CIOs (might not be concerned) with or remember Myspace, but in the early 2000’s, it was the leading music-sharing platform. It had millions of songs uploaded to its site between 2003 and 2015, but those songs and all that content are now gone thanks to a server migration error. This week, the social networking company admitted to losing 12 years worth of music—a loss of around 50 million songs.

“As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace,” the company stated on its website. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

From 2005 to 2008, Myspace was the most popular social media site before Facebook took over. It was credited with launching numerous music careers for artists such as Kate Nash, Arctic Monkeys, and Calvin Harris, all of whom were discovered on Myspace. And even though it’s been in decline for years, it still held the music of up to 14 million artists that now may be lost.

For many artists, it’s an incredibly sad situation, and it could have been prevented if Myspace had instituted a proper backup and restore solution.

Why Your Cloud Needs a Backup and Restore Solution

The unfortunate truth is that your personal cloud data isn’t 100% safe, particularly during a data or server migration. The problem is that all it takes is one error or sync issue while you’re transferring your data from one system to another and the whole thing could fail. This is especially true when it comes to complex and large projects where many basic conditions must be met throughout the entire transfer.

Even with careful planning of your server migration, things can go wrong that are outside of your control, but these issues are common knowledge to IT managers;

• Your SaaS provider may experience an outage that halts the migration and accidentally deletes data.
• Consolidation and virtualization of your data can bog down the system or overload it.
• During the cloud migration, the security of your data could be compromised.

In all of these cases, your server migration could fail, and your content could be lost permanently.

CloudAlly provides a point in time restore, which protects all of your critical data on a separate system unconnected from a migration situation.  In the case of on-going backup, its necessary to activate a cloud to cloud backup solution for services such as G Suite, Box, Dropbox, Salesforce, Office 365 and more.

The post Myspace Data Loss appeared first on CloudAlly.

Over the last few years, more and more financial services organizations have adopted public cloud services for a unique competitive advantage. That’s why MarketsandMarkets predicts that the financial cloud market will grow at a CAGR of 24.4% to reach $29.47 billion by 2021.

“In the past, banks and financial institutions showed hesitation in adopting cloud-based offerings, citing potential security concerns and risks associated with migrating from on-premises systems,” Martin Häring, the chief marketing officer at Finastra told InformationAge. “Today, it’s more common for financial institutions to embrace cloud-based applications, as they realize the benefits they can deliver in terms of cost reduction and efficiency.”

Public Cloud Services and Data Protection Regulations

The public cloud offers many incredible benefits for financial institutions. It can deliver innovation, customization, and security on a greater scale. It offers agility, increased efficiency, new investment opportunities, and reduced operational costs—all huge benefits. PWC estimates that the public cloud will become the dominant infrastructure model in FinTech by 2020.

Public cloud services offer financial institutions:

• The ability to scale at a moment’s notice. It can be difficult for financial institutions to change—they are big and bulky. However, the cloud helps banks meet demand quickly and scale their services in order to fix the problem.
• A way to cut costs. When the World Bank switched over to Microsoft Office 365, they were able to cut the annual costs of running their email from $12 million to $6 million, while also offering their employees the ability to work remotely.
• The ability to keep up with the evolving technological landscape in a way that improves customer responsiveness and enhances employee workloads.

Popular Public Cloud for Banks

There’s a reason why over half of banks and their consultants are already using public cloud services, and 64% of banks plan to migrate to a public cloud in the next two years. Some of the most popular public cloud services that banks use include:

• Office 365: Office 365 helps financial institutions do everything from improving customer responsiveness to increasing business agility. For example, World Bank migrated to Office 365 along with Singapore-based DBS and Bank of America.
• Google Suite: Google Suite is also a popular public cloud service used by ATB Financial, BBVA banks, and Bci (Chile’s largest bank). It’s used to increase employee productivity, drive innovation, and strengthen customer connections.

Data Protection Regulations and Risks

Unfortunately, banks and other financial institutions face many regulations and security protocols that other industries never have to consider when it comes to bank data protection. There are very high standards for data protection, data privacy, business continuity, and disaster recovery.

So, while moving to the cloud is essential for the financial services industry in 2019, it’s also fraught with risks and challenges. 22 percent of banks worry about data security and 29% of banks see regulation as a barrier to cloud adoption, according to a recent Temenos banking survey.

Data Breaches in Banks

And there are many reasons to be concerned about your data security and protection in the cloud.

• In 2008, Heartland Payment Systems was hacked revealing the credit cards of more than 130 million customers.
• In 2009, CheckFree Corp was hit by cybercriminals, affecting 5 million customers who had their credentials stolen.
• In 2014, Korea Credit Bureau had an employee who secretly copied data of more than 20 million victims including credit card numbers, identification numbers, and addresses.
• In 2014, JPMorgan Chase reported a data breach that affected 76 million households and 7 million small businesses.
• In 2017, Equifax reported that a data breach compromised 400,000 British accounts and 143 million U.S. accounts.

How Do Banks Back Up Their Data?

So, if financial institutions are using public cloud services, how do banks back up their data and protect it from hackers and more? Good question. The answer is, “Not easily.”

In a post-Dodd-Frank Act financial world, banks are required to maintain all records for five years. FFIEC standards also demand that they focus on five specific data areas:

1. Risk management and oversight
2. Threat intelligence and collaboration
3. Cybersecurity controls
4. External dependency management
5. Cyber incident management resilience

With data a priority, there’s a need to have a powerful backup system in place that offers comprehensive security as well as a way to restore data quickly in the case of a breach. There’s also a significant need for service continuity in the cases of mishaps on the cloud.

CloudAlly for the Financial Services Industry

The key is that financial institutions can’t focus on just meeting regulatory cybersecurity standards and data requirements; they should focus on beating them. That means that the financial services industry must take extra measures to protect and utilize their data in the cloud. To do that, your organization should implement a data backup solution that gives you extra security, data accessibility, and restoration capabilities.

A service such as CloudAlly offers additional protection for commonly used cloud computing services such as Office 365 and Google Suite, allowing you to store all your data—including millions of transactions—for as long as you need (not just five years, but indefinitely). You also gain reliable backups, Amazon S3 secure storage, and ISO 27001 certification for information security management.

Learn more about how CloudAlly can work for your financial institution today.

The post Cloud Computing in the Financial Services Industry appeared first on CloudAlly.

Why is Dropbox business backup necessary?

Restore Dropbox files

Dropbox is a popular business storage medium because businesses use it to share files with third parties. It’s often an excellent tool for teams that need to collaborate on a remote basis. Dropbox offers certain kinds of streamlined interface design and compatibility that allow for free file sharing and transparency in complicated business workflows. For example, multiple users can create a folder for collaborative files abnd easily move a document through an edit process.

However, Dropbox as a storage medium should not be confused with a secure place to keep key business data over the long term. Without the ability to restore Dropbox files with a Dropbox backup & restore system, businesses could be putting many of their data assets at risk.

Dropbox advertises its file retention policy as according to various factors.

In any case, it makes abundant sense to have a third-party backup system in order to keep that information recoverable to the company for much longer than 30 days. For instance, if files are deleted when an employee exits the company or during a transition time,CIOs and IT managers may not realize the value of that data until they need a restore to work.

Cloudally Dropbox data cloud to cloud backup system takes all of the Dropbox files in the interface and puts them in a secure Dropbox backup folder as part of an Amazon S3 storage environment. It’s perfect for restoring files that have been deleted:

• Because of employee turnover
• In process changeovers
• By a disgruntled employee or other malicious insider
• Through hacking or unauthorized access
• Through simple mistakes in choosing which data assets to save at the user level

A safe and secure third party Dropbox backup & restore system can also help with privacy and security issues and in some cases, with industry compliance. Take a look at what Cloudally can offer for secure storage in these types of scenarios:

Internal Conflict or Employee Transition –

Employee turnover can be abundantly confusing for a business. Often, there is no point person explicitly in charge to make sure that data assets connected to one employee don’t get erased as the job role changes hands.

In addition, there sometimes conflict that drives employees to work against the business interests. Even in a best case scenario, the employees themselves may not be extremely conscientious about keeping key data in place. If they’re disgruntled, they can do tremendous damage by willfully erasing files.

Simply put, a slip of the finger can cause enormously devastating consequences. Without a Dropbox cloud to cloud backup folder system, companies are putting themselves in real peril when it comes to protecting data assets. Say you have a CTO or supervisor or even a frontline worker walk off the job – and go home and start messing with their smartphone. With the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, we took company data from the shelled system of the in-office intranet to employee endpoint devices, and that’s part of what’s making companies so jumpy about data security. That’s also why it’s a good idea to have a comprehensive backup for all of those many situations that you just can’t predict in terms of employee turnover and personal relationships within a corporate culture.

Getting Basic Information –

When a business faces tricky product or consumer research or legal challenges, discovery helps to build the insights and prove the facts that will help the company to survive and thrive. But if stakeholders such as attorneys or internal research teams can’t find that information, they can’t help the company.

One of the most important reasons to use a system that helps to restore Dropbox files is for the purposes of discovery. With this Dropbox backup & restore system in place, you know that the company will have the means to restore data if the need arises sometime down the road.

Many expert attorneys would suggest having a long-term Dropbox cloud backup folder system in place for this particular reason. Attorneys and other similar professionals and everyone else understands that data is a valuable asset. Companies are now starting to understand this more, too – and they are upgrading their data security practices as a result. Backup planning and other forms of data backups have become incredibly popular these days as businesses try to adjust themselves to the current realities around how we use technology in the workplace.

Hacking and other Emergencies –

Storage has become one of the primary means of doing business in the twenty first century.

Get comprehensive Dropbox backup from Cloudally and protect all of your data – so that when errors, attacks or circumstance threaten, you have the information that you need intact.

The post 5 Reasons Why CIO’s Need To Backup Dropbox Business appeared first on CloudAlly.

View Our Dropbox Restore – Video Demo

Dropbox Business is a cloud storage solution which provides the business with access to your files anywhere, on any device, and provides excellent sharing and storing business assets. Many businesses find this file storage & sharing solution of great value, and take extra precautions in backing it up on cloud, in order to secure their data against breaches, accidental deletions, malicious deletions, etc.  As a communication and collaboration solution in the business activities, this solution provides greater value when there is a backup & restore in place.  So, how do we restore lost data on Dropbox?

Dropbox Business data can be accidentally or maliciously deleted or corrupted, and is vulnerable to ransom-ware attacks.

If it so happens that your business has lost data, and recovery is necessary, CloudAlly application is necessary in order to restore your data, after backup takes place.

About Our Dropbox Restore – Demo Video

In our newest demo video, we show you how easy it is to restore your data in Dropbox Business for your company’s employee’s.  Once you’ve activating your CloudAlly backup is simple, safe, and can be completed in just a few easy-to-follow steps. You’ll notice how user-friendly our software is as well as how many options you have for customizing your backup & restore solution.

Let our two-minute video, take you through the step-by-step process of restoring your Dropbox Business cloud storage solution, so you can sit back and relax knowing that your data is safe and that you can restore like an expert.

To backup Dropbox Business solution, don’t forget, we have a risk Free 15-day trial available! We want to show you how easy it is to protect your data, and restore it when needed, from any point in time without any problem.

When you’re ready to know more, contact CloudAlly by calling +1.917.338.0385 or filling out our Contact Form.
We can’t wait to work with you to keep your Dropbox Business data safe and sound.

View the Dropbox Business video demo to see how easy to use, secure and reliable CloudAlly’s Dropbox Business.

The post How to restore lost data in Dropbox? appeared first on CloudAlly.

Office 365 Backup – Why Isn’t it Already Included?

Does office 365 backup your data?

It’s no secret that IT managers, CIOs, and business owners are moving in droves to the cloud over the past year, and organizations such as Microsoft, Google, Salesforce are seeing a significant upward trend in the volume of businesses, migrating from on-premises Exchange environments to Office 365 online, G Suite, etc. So, is your data backed up by office 365? This is what we intend to find out in this blog post.

What this article is about:

• Why should IT managers move to the cloud?
• Why do IT managers need to backup their Office 365 data?
• Why is there a scenario in which a restore is needed?
• What about the cost of backup?
• Recovery procedure in Microsoft Office 365

Why should IT managers move to the cloud?

IT managers who used to manage a ‘server closet’ have now freed that space, and instead of upgrading, maintaining, supporting technical problems with hardware, they now can focus their energy on supporting the business needs of the employee. This move from on-premise to cloud makes absolute sense. When it comes to emails, files, storage, messaging, there’s hardly any difference (in terms of business value and competitiveness) if you manage them in-house yourself or consume the business solutions as a service.

This is all true except for one particular part of On-premise Vs Cloud; the difference is in: Backup & Restore, in particular Office 365 backup, G Suite Backup, and such.

So what is the classic definition of a backup: Backup: Copies all data and data files that have changed since the last full backup.

However, to achieve true DR (disaster recovery) the backup data center needs to be separate from the original data source, and the copy of the file, email, etc needs to be stored so that if the original system or service is unavailable, it can replace it.

Some IT managers still use a standard on-premises enterprise estate, with MS Exchange. Some have tape, or disk backup as a solution, keeping data anywhere from 1-6 years. There are those CIOs who choose not to delete any information, and keep it on LTO2 tape drive, and old company servers in-office. Not moving to cloud does have its disadvantages, as all this information can be placed at risk in case of fire, theft, and damage. Some countries have regulatory needs in terms of Data Centers, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to secure historical servers against data breaches.

Why do IT managers need to backup their Office 365 data?

Let’s be clear, backup is not free. So why allocate budget expenditure to backing up these business solutions? The simple answer to this question is that we need to be able to restore from any point in time, with an unlimited retention period. It’s all about being able to restore! CIOs need to be able to restore a whole business solution, or individual emails. This is critical to business continuity, and growth.

Why is there a scenario in which a restore is needed?

An IT admin might be required to restore data because a user, an employee has left the company and deleted his/hers emails, Salesforce leads/contacts, data files, and other information necessary for the new employee on-boarding the company in that specific job role.

In other actual situations, an employee might have deleted this data intentionally, or even accidentally, maliciously… in which case the burden of restore falls on the IT department.

Other more problematic situations are when the IT department faces a malicious malware virus, and ransomware is used by an external hacker. This is where cloud backup comes into play, as the IT admin restores the data back to a point in time, before the hack took place. Such Ransomware attacks are likely to compromise the company SharePoint/OneDrive data, and Microsoft restore capabilities do not address this need.

It’s necessary to recall that Microsoft deleted data retention periods are very short – about 90 days – and incomplete… because instances such as Azure server outages have occurred in the past, which again halt business activity. If cloud to cloud backup is in place, the IT admin is able to restore from Amazon AWS data center using applications such as CloudAlly, but only if the company CIO understood the value of backup and activated it on www.CloudAlly.com

What about the cost of backup?

If we examine Microsoft Office 365, E3… per user/month, it costs about $25-30? This cost contains a backup for 90 odd days, so once you’ve deleted your items from both your inbox and the Deleted Items folder, what happens next when you need to restore?

However, if we look at backing up Office 365 Exchange; with a backup scope of Mail, Calendar, Contacts and Tasks. And, this includes the following backup features: backup all or selected users, backup Office 365 Exchanges, and also automatically detect new users. What does this all cost to the organization? The backup cost is $30 per user/year.

The cost for backup is further reduced in companies with over 100 employees, and or for those CIOs who use a bundle backup for multiple services. The opportunity cost of not backing up is sheer folly .. risking business assets, which can be made secure and safe.

Recovery procedure in Microsoft Office 365

Use the recoverable Items folder which holds items up to 30 days (14 days is the default state). Items which remain in the folder longer than 30 days are lost, forever … without any way to recover them. (But, it’s possible to purge your own Recoverable Items folder at any time.)

There are IT managers which are adamant that Microsoft has thought about all this, and provides cloud backup, after they have migrated to cloud. This is partly true in fact, Microsoft’s reply to this situation is a Litigation Hold. This feature copies all the e-mails into an immutable area (hidden from users in Recoverable Items). Also, there is also an In-Place Hold option; but gradually Microsoft is phasing it out. Some IT managers have already been informed of this.

If In-Place Hold wasn’t phased out, the IT managers options weren’t so limited, Litigation Hold doesn’t support public folders, like In-Place Hold. So, eventually if its needed to backup public folders, there is no other way but to adopt a 3rd party solution like CloudAlly.com

*Microsoft Website Note on Litigation Hold and In-Place Hold:
06/24/2019

We’ve postponed the July 1, 2017 deadline for creating new In-Place Holds in Exchange Online (in Office 365 and Exchange Online standalone plans). But later this year or early next year, you won’t be able to create new In-Place Holds in Exchange Online. As an alternative to using In-Place Holds, you can use eDiscovery cases or Office 365 retention policies in the Office 365 Security & Compliance Center. After we decommission new In-Place Holds, you’ll still be able to modify existing In-Place Holds, and creating new In-Place Holds in an Exchange hybrid deployment will still be supported. And, you’ll still be able to place mailboxes on Litigation Hold.

In any case using litigation hold as a backup creates more legal risk by exposing all company data to eDiscovery rather than only those items that really require litigation hold.

Knowledgeable IT admins, as a process of securing the data, require a separation of roles, so that O365 administrators could assign themselves eDiscovery Manager rights, and gain full access to search and export from Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint folders, and OneDrive folders. And, also change the Litigation Hold policies.

This is exactly why 3rd party cloud backup solutions become useful when integrated with O365. The CloudAlly solution includes role-based access control, which assists organizations to comply with the regional data protection laws, while also allowing a different admin to control the rights to restore.

To conclude; the proficient Chief Information Officer, knows that an independent online 3rd party backup, is the correct policy in organizations using cloud solutions. Some of them started to backup their Office 365 with a Free 14 day trial.

Now that you know about that Office 365 doesn’t fully backup your data, you might want to have a look at what we created for you…

The post Does office 365 backup your data? appeared first on CloudAlly.

CloudAlly Identified as a Value Provider for Business Continuity

CloudAlly identified as one of the key players (as a cloud backup & restore vendor,) across the value chain of the global business continuity management planning solution market.

NBC2 News Today – has recently reported on a survey done by Persistence Market Research on the topic of: Business Continuity Management Planning Solution Market is Expected to Grow ~ US$ 1.6 Bn by the end of 2029 – PMR.

CEO’s today realize cloud to cloud backup to be an integral part of business continuity.

Business continuity in incidents requiring disaster recovery, have become more common in recent times due to an influx of Malware and Ransomware occurrences, data center outages, and such.  Cloud to cloud backup solutions like CloudAlly provide a 3rd party, Amazon AWS backup of major business solutions such as Office 365, SharePoint/OneDrive, G Suite, and such.  Businesses in need of email exchange recovery, or CRM data restore, utilize the 3rd party backup by CloudAlly to ensure business continuity, with zero business operation disturbance.

 PMR – Persistence Market Research is a US based third-platform research firm. Its research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.

Read more about the market report.

The post Business Continuity Management Planning Solution Market appeared first on CloudAlly .

…with increasingly common cloud outages?

Why cloud to cloud backup is needed for business continuity in the face of  recent series of outages?

On January 24, 2019, European Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Online users discovered that they couldn’t access their emails. It turned out that some of Microsoft’s data center infrastructure had failed, leaving these cloud users out of luck.

While one Microsoft cloud outage might not have been a problem, less than a week later, users faced problems with their cloud Office 365 and Azure and Dynamics services. The outage was blamed on a CenturyLink software defect.

These outages from major players in the cloud industry has IT pros nervous, and for a good reason indeed. Is the cloud really the full-scale solution we’ve been promised? Certainly, in order to adopt cloud services without worrying about down-time, it’s important to use a third-party service that helps you recover lost data and continue operations during outages.

What this article is about:

• Outages from Big-Name Cloud Providers
• Is the Cloud Actually Trustworthy?
• Using a Third-Party Backup for Recovery

Outages from Big-Name Cloud Providers 

This year, many of the best-known cloud providers have had one or more outages. Some of these well-known cloud providers have included widely-used business services, like Google Cloud, Apple Play, and iCloud.

On March 12, 2019, for example, Gmail and Google Drive were down for over three hours. Microsoft Azure, which includes features like Microsoft 365, Active Directory and database services, and storage, was down for almost three hours on May 2.

While many of the cloud outages this year have been relatively short, this time offline adds up in productivity and money. Further, different cloud providers have differing outage length, so your business could be more or less affected based on the service you use. From January 2018 through May 2019, Amazon Web Services (AWS) only had 338 hours of downtime, with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) reporting 361 hours. Microsoft Azure, in turn, reported 1,934 hours of downtime.

Complicating this outage reporting time, too, is the fact that there is no standardized measure for reporting cloud outages. Each company must self-report its outage times and frequencies. This means, then, that Azure and GCP often don’t report the regional impact of cloud outages. For example, some services would report only one hour of downtime, even if that downtime affected three distinct service regions.

With good reason, these regular outages have worried IT professionals about how reliable cloud services are for their businesses. After all, how would operations come to a halt if Office 365 Exchange came to a halt in the middle of the workday?

Is the Cloud Actually Trustworthy? 

Cloud platforms are growing at an exponential rate. In 2019, Gartner predicts that cloud services will increase by a remarkable 17.5 percent in just one year. Though cloud providers know about the issues that will inevitably face their data centers and services, an increasing demand for cloud services means that problems will certainly continue to arise.

For example, as cloud services increase quickly to meet demand, older on-premises infrastructure that probably should have been aged out will be forced to work another day.

Still, while most of the outages thus far have often been short, a loss estimate has been predicted for a longer outage that lasts for three to six days. Because so many businesses rely on a limited number of providers, the estimators suggest, an outage that lasts for multiple days could lose companies a total of $15bn. Small businesses would be particularly at risk for loss because many of them don’t have cyber-insurance.

Using a Third-Party Backup for Recovery 

There are undeniably benefits to using cloud services, and as we see a significant industry change, companies that don’t switch over will likely be left behind. At the same time, though, cloud outages will likely continue to be a problem as the industry expands.

The only solution, then, is to be prepared for cloud outages, or even data loss, before it happens. Using a third-party cloud to cloud backup like CloudAlly for Office 365, G Suite, SharePoint, OneDrive, and DropBox ensures that you’ll be able to recover necessary files during a cloud outage.

Say for example that you’d experienced the Office 365 email outage described above. With CloudAlly, your users would have had their email contacts and mailboxes saved the day before with CloudAlly’s automatic daily backup. With CloudAlly restore, they could have retrieved the information they needed to continue daily functions until the outage was restored. Once that happened, then users could access both their older and newer files, accessible through CloudAlly’s non-destructive data restore.

Interested to know more about why it’s necessary to protect your online data? Read our eBook Why Backup Online Data? to learn more.

The post How cloud to cloud backup solutions, help avoid business continuity disruption? appeared first on CloudAlly.

SaaS Backup

An increasing number of organizations are moving to SaaS platforms like Office 365, G Suite and Salesforce. It is a misconception however to assume that your data on the cloud is secure. Understand the risks of data loss on the cloud and use SaaS backup solutions to protect it. 

This article contains:

• SaaS data loss is a reality
• Main reasons for SaaS data loss
• How do you secure your SaaS data?

SaaS data loss is a reality

You’ve moved your data to a SaaS platform, and are hugely benefiting from its flexibility, scalability, and fantastic collaboration mechanisms. However, did you know that while SaaS solutions like Office 365, G Suite, Box, and Salesforce, have best-in-class security precautions, they cannot protect your data from data breaches or data loss at your end or from platform outages? Which is why it is no surprise that SaaS industry news is replete with increasingly frequent occurrences of outages and security breaches. 

At the root of it is a mistaken (but gradually changing) perception within the IT workforce that using cloud / SaaS solutions means that there is no need for data in the cloud to be backed up.

Main reasons for SaaS data loss

According to Ponemon Institute’s Cost of a Data Breach 2019 report, the global average cost of a data breach is $3.92 million. Your data on the cloud is vulnerable to loss and breaches due to these reasons:

Human error: An account mistakenly deleted, a critical email erased or an org-wide shared document overwritten? Nightmarish scenarios that cannot be fixed without a backup and recovery solution.

Malicious intent: Your SaaS data is also prone to intentional overwrites, and deletes by bad actors like disgruntled or malicious employees.

Synchronization errors: Syncing or updating multiple SaaS applications, which is a common software scenario in organizations, is not always seamless and can cause loss of SaaS data.

Hackers, Malware, Ransomware, Cryptomining, Phishing: There is an ever-growing list of malware types and scams. The damages due to such data breaches are devastating not only in terms of financial loss, but also damage the business’ reputation and cause loss of customers. 

Your SaaS platforms cannot protect you from all these causes. Additionally, many regulatory laws such as GDPR, HiPAA, SOX, etc. mandate that protecting SaaS data is a “shared responsibility”, and an organization needs to have accurate recovery capabilities in the event of data loss.

How do you secure your SaaS data?

Ironically, the cloud itself is the answer to protect your SaaS data. Cloud-to-cloud backup harnesses the many advantages of the cloud to provide reliable backup and quick recovery. 

CloudAlly provides SaaS backup solutions for the entire range of SaaS platforms – Office365, G Suite, Salesforce, Sharepoint and OneDrive, Dropbox, Box and more. We were also ranked #1 under best business tool category by Newsweek by over 10,000 IT Pros. We offer a full-featured 15-day free trial which you can activate and start backing up your data in minutes and are very highly rated and recommended by our users.

Contact us to have an expert guide you as you navigate the waters of data protection to achieve a reliable and secure enterprise.

The post Why Do You Need SaaS Backup for Your Data in the Cloud? appeared first on CloudAlly.

Office 365 Data Loss

It is a myth that Microsoft will protect you from data loss in Office 365. Microsoft is incrementally ensuring a reliable service, but the data within your Office 365 tenant is your responsibility. However, it cannot protect you from Office 365 data loss at your end – due to malware, human error or malicious intent.

This article contains:

• Onus of protecting Office 365 data
• Ways data loss occurs in Office 365
• Office 365 outages
• Office 365 archives
• How do you safeguard against Office 365 data loss

YOU have the onus of protecting Office 365 data

As per Compliance Laws

As per governance laws like the GDPR, HiPAA, SOX, and many others, protecting your customer’s data is a responsibility that is shared between the controller (your organization) and the processor (third-party service providers like SaaS platforms). Moreover, in the event of a data breach or data loss, “shared accountability” and “joint liability” is mandated.

Need another reason? Compliance laws also insist on the organization having “the ability to restore the availability and access to personal data in a timely manner in the event of a physical or technical incident”. What that means, is that they mandate that you have a solution or capability to accurately backup and restore data.

As per your Cloud Service Provider

Microsoft provides a highly reliable service with Office 365, but they themselves recommend backup in their service agreement, “We strive to keep the Services up and running; however, all online services suffer occasional disruptions and outages, and Microsoft is not liable for any disruption or loss you may suffer as a result. In the event of an outage, you may not be able to retrieve Your Content or Data that you’ve stored. We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services” 

Do not be mistaken – your data in Office 365 is your responsibility!

Ways data loss occurs in Office 365

Human Error: Office 365  has not yet reached the maturity where it can decipher intent when all the rules of the service are followed. We are talking about accidental deletions of data by parties with no ill-intent – plain human error. According to Aberdeen Group, research shows that 70% of all data loss is accidental.

Malware: Then there are malicious actors such as hackers, ransomware, and malware that can cause massive data loss. While there is so much you can do to fully prevent these attacks, these do happen and you need countermeasures.

And don’t forget about the disgruntled employee causing data loss by malicious intent!

Office 365 outages do happen

Service in the cloud means 99.9% uptime. In the first few months of 2019 alone, Office 365 has suffered two major outages. The second outage dated 28th January 2019 was a massive two-day outage. 

Another Microsoft outage caused data loss where Microsoft deleted several Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) databases in Azure, holding live customer information. 

We are talking no email access, no customer emails, no spreadsheets, no presentations – Basically bringing your enterprise to a halt. Can you quantify the financial loss in having your data unavailable or lost for that long? 

What about native Office 365 archives

Office 365 offers short preset retention periods for deleted emails and deleted items in OneDrive. However, they hold data only for a limited period of time, do not backup regularly (your data will be outdated), and restoring data from may be cumbersome. Such options are more of an archival mechanism than a true backup and restore solution.

So how do you safeguard against Office 365 data loss?

So now that you know that your data in Office 365 needs dependable protection against data loss, what should you do? Select a 

Cloudally provides a safe (ISO 27001 certified, GDPR, and HIPAA compliant), secure (Amazon S3 Secure Storage and AES-256 Encryption) and flexible cloud backup solutions for Office365, Sharepoint and OneDrive, We were also ranked #1 under best business tool category by Newsweek by over 10,000 IT Pros. We offer a full-featured 15-day free trial which you can activate and start backing up your data in minutes and are very highly rated and recommended by our users.

Contact us to have an expert guide you as you navigate the waters of data protection to achieve a reliable and secure enterprise.

The post How Can You Safeguard Against Data Loss in Office 365? appeared first on CloudAlly.

By Slava Gorelik – Founder and VP R&D

Malware threats to data

Hackers are getting more ingenious by the day with fileless invisible malware types that escape detection. Nodersok is the latest in the line, but it is only one amongst many. Top 10 malware infections in 2019 included Emotet, Wannacry, ZeuS, Dridex, and Kovter. How can an organization secure itself against such: malware threats to data?

What is Nodersok?

In September 2019,  researchers from Microsoft’s Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) team discovered a fileless multi-stage infection, node.js based malware. They dubbed it Nodersok. Fileless threats pose a different level of challenge compared to file-based ones and need advanced techniques to manage prevention. Nodersok uses valid tools and ensures nothing malicious is written to the disk. The malice resides in-memory. The entire Nodersok campaign runs in four stages, finally disabling the Windows Defender Antivirus and turning the machine into a proxy. Nodersok has affected a range of industry sectors with a particular fondness for the education sector.

How prevalent are malware attacks?

Different though they are, these forms of malware show certain common aspects:

• Microsoft Office is a favorite
• Email is the primary attack vector
• Over 60% of the attacks target the small business category. 

How do you protect your organization and data from them?

Malware protection in Office 365

If your enterprise has moved to Office 365, you have taken a step in the right direction. Office 365 comes with built-in protection that prevents the introduction of malware into Office 365 via a client or from an Office 365 server.  Exchange online ensures that all emails travel through the Exchange Online Protector (EOP) which scans and quarantines in real-time.

Microsoft also offers Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) with an email filtering service that provides additional protection against phishing. Similar protection exists for Sharepoint Online and OneDrive for Business as well.  With all the defense in place, malware threats to data still do materialize and while there is no consistent globally agreed way to track and report a cost per infection, in 2018, in the US alone the average cost per breach was $7.9 million.

Data loss from threats like malware are an established reality and enterprises both big and small cannot afford to take the risk. For malware to infest your organization, all it takes is one wrong click, one crafty phishing attack, one infected flash drive. Office 365 cannot protect you from data loss/corruption due to such attacks at your end. This is why third-party SaaS backup is so critical to protecting your organization’s data.

How can SaaS backup protect against Malware threats to data?

The damages of malware threats to an organization include data corruption, data loss, identity theft, and security/network breaches. The repercussions of such an attack go far beyond financial loss; they can decimate a company’s reputation and customer base, which has taken years to build, in a few hours. When struck with a malware attack, the best way to minimize its damage is to ensure business continuity with quick disaster recovery.

Central to that is having a reliable backup and recovery solution. SaaS backup of Office 365 can enable you to easily and quickly recover an accurate copy of your data and can completely blunt the malware attack. Office 365 does come with native solutions like Recycle Bin, however, they offer limited-timespan restores and recovery can be cumbersome. 

How can CloudAlly help?

CloudAlly pioneered cloud backup way back in 2011. Resultantly we have nurtured a mature suite of robust SaaS backup solutions for Office 365 Backup, Sharepoint and OneDrive.  We were also ranked #1 by Newsweek by over 10,000 IT Pros.

We offer a full-featured 15-day free trial which you can activate and start backing up your data in minutes and are very highly rated and recommended by our users. We also offer considerable discounts for educational institutions, non-profit organizations, and as a part of our partner program. Contact us and we will be happy to have an expert guide you.

The post Nodersok: How Can You Protect Your Enterprise From Malware Threats? appeared first on CloudAlly.

Recover Deleted OneDrive Files

OneDrive for Business is at the heart of Office 365. It is one of the most popular file-sharing apps, providing organizations with a secure SaaS collaboration platform to store, share, and work on various document types. With so much business-critical information on OneDrive, an accidental/malicious deletion or corruption would be disastrous, to put it mildly. So here’s a step-by-step process to: recover deleted OneDrive files, along with best practices to protect your valuable OneDrive data.

This article includes:

• Steps to recover a deleted OneDrive file
• Limitations of OneDrive’s native restore options
• Best practices for OneDrive data protection

Steps to recover deleted OneDrive files

Option 1: Recover deleted OneDrive files from Recycle Bin within 30 days

If a user deletes a file, it is stored for 30 days in the OneDrive for Business Recycle Bin. While still in this Recycle Bin, simply go into the bin and restore the file. 

Option 2: Recover deleted OneDrive files from Second-Stage Recycle Bin after 30 days

After 30 days, or if the user empties the recycle bin, files are stored for an additional 30 days in the “Second-Stage Recycle Bin.” From the Recycle Bin click on the “Second-Stage Recycle Bin.” Then click on the file, files, or folder you want to be restored.

Option 3: Recover deleted OneDrive files after 60 days via OneDrive Restore

Microsoft rolled out its OneDrive restore capability in 2018. Using it you can revert OneDrive data to a specific date and time in the last 30 days before that file was compromised. 

• In OneDrive, under Settings, select Restore OneDrive
• Select the point-in-time for OneDrive Restore
• OneDrive will bring up a timeline with the changes a user has made within 30 days. Using the slider, pick the data before which the OneDrive files were corrupted or deleted.  All other activities that occurred after that are selected automatically. 
• Deselect the activities that you do not want to be restored. Click Restore to complete the restoration of OneDrive to the chosen date. 

Limitations of OneDrive’s native recovery options

Though the files restore feature seems simple enough to use, there are significant limitations: 

• Recovery is time-bound: 30 days after a file is deleted it goes to the Recycle Bin, 30 days after that it goes to the secondary Recycle Bin, and finally, 30 days post that it can be recovered using the steps OneDrive Restore option. After 93 days, it is permanently deleted. Consider that you are asked to recover an important file or email from three months ago. Unfortunately, you cannot. As Microsoft says, “items  are automatically deleted after 93 days”.
• Erroneous, cumbersome recovery: As recovery is based on batch restores, an error recovering an artifact from the batch will jeopardize the entire batch recovery. If malware has struck and bulk deletions or corruptions have occurred, imagine the added stress of recovering files bit by bit. Moreover, all changes a user has made to the file(s) are completely overwritten.
• Limited Recovery capabilities: With Recycle Bins, no point-in-time recovery is possible and with Restore Your OneDrive, no granular restore is supported. Restoring OneDrive does not recover folder structures or sharing permissions. 
• Poor notifications: Consider that a disgruntled employee deleted a few critical documents – it would escape the native notification system. As per OneDrive Restore, “Notifications are sent to users when a higher than usual number of files are deleted per hour”.

Best practices for OneDrive data protection

Here are some pointers to optimally protect your OneDrive data:

• Ensure that as the admin, you have subscribed for OneDrive mass delete notifications.
• Use OneDrive’s folder protection feature to sync offline folders with those on the cloud.
• Guarantee recovery with third-party cloud backup and recovery. Native OneDrive recovery options have multiple limitations. Limitations that an organization reeling under the consequences of a security breach, malware attack or sync error, can do without. The best way to facilitate speedy disaster recovery and ensure business continuity is with quick and easy data recovery. 

CloudAlly’s OneDrive/SharePoint backup solution comprehensively backs up OneDrive along with SharePoint Online Team Site (and all sub-sites), Public Site (and all sub-sites), and private Site Collections. The backup is reliably stored on Amazon S3 secure storage. Both point-in-time and granular restores are supported with unlimited data retention. Further, when you need to restore a file or folder, CloudAlly performs a non-destructive restore, so any further changes a user made after the loss date won’t be overwritten. 

Blunt the risk of a malware attack, accidental/malicious data loss or a sync error – all of which are increasingly common causes of data loss. Protect your OneDrive data with CloudAlly’s mature (we pioneered SaaS backup in 2011) and top-rated (voted as a top business tool by Newsweek by over 10,000 IT Pros) OneDrive backup and recovery solution.

Get fail-safe OneDrive recovery. Start your free trial now!

The post How Can You Recover Deleted OneDrive Files? appeared first on CloudAlly.