Scaling M365 Backups for Large Organizations
Scaling M365 Backups for Large Enterprises: Tales from the Finance Department and More
As Microsoft 365 environments grow, many organisations find that protecting thousands of users poses challenges far more complex than mere backup management. Large enterprises need to achieve business continuity while managing performance, storage efficiency, compliance, recovery objectives, and long-term scalability.
For companies in finance, healthcare, education, legal services and other highly regulated industries, Microsoft 365 backups have become a critical part of operational resilience. As such, many enterprises are turning to Synology Active Backup for Microsoft 365 to help them gain more control over backup infrastructure, while also reducing operational complexity.
Lessons learned from real-world enterprise deployments of Microsoft 365 backup operations offer valuable insights for scaling them successfully.
The Challenges of Large-Scale Microsoft 365 Backup Environments
Large organisations often have a need to protect:
- Thousands of employee accounts
- Mailboxes in Exchange Online
- OneDrive repositories
- SharePoint websites
- Teams data from Microsoft
- Discontinued user accounts
- Previous compliance history
As data volumes increase into multi-terabyte ranges, organisations should consider:
- Performance of backup
- Storage usage
- Rate of recovery
- Requirements for retention
- Protection offsite
- Administrative efficiency
These challenges often require organisations to reconsider traditional backup strategies.
Idea Bank Managing enterprise data growth
One of the most recognisable enterprise deployments of Synology is at Idea Bank, one of Poland’s largest financial institutions.
Idea Bank, like many financial institutions, needed:
- Secure data protection
- Solid recovery capabilities
- Efficient storage
- Long term scalability
- Centralised management
Financial institutions produce huge amounts of data and do so under strict regulatory requirements. Backup systems must be able to support operational recovery as well as compliance obligations.
The deployment demonstrated how organisations can leverage the Synology infrastructure to improve storage efficiency while retaining a high level of backup performance.
Enterprise lesson
Storage efficiency is important One of the biggest concerns of large Microsoft 365 environments is storage consumption.
Without optimisation organisations often struggle with:
- Fast storage growth
- Rising costs of infrastructure
- Capacity is hard to plan
- Problems with expanding backup repository
Here’s where Synology’s storage optimisation technologies come in.
The Advantage of Deduplication
Large Microsoft 365 environments tend to have duplicate content across:
- Files shared
- Attachments from email
- Repositories in departments
- Collaboration spaces for teams
- OneDrive-accounts
Organisations can utilise data reduction technologies to significantly reduce backup storage requirements.
For enterprises protecting thousands of users, storage efficiency improvements can mean substantial long-term cost savings.
Performance that Scales
The more users you have, the more critical backup performance becomes.
Many of the large Microsoft 365 environments have to handle:
- Data sets of multi terabytes
- High daily rate of change
- Large Teams Repositories
- Large SharePoint libraries
The first backup is often the most resource-intensive part.
Factors that impact performance are:
- Microsoft 365 data size
- Bandwidth of the Internet
- Microsoft APIs throttling
- NAS hardware resources
- Configure storage
- Creating backup tasks
If your organization has thousands of users to protect, your very first backup should be treated as a deployment project, not a routine backup job.
Incremental Backup Speed
Once the initial sync is done, incremental backup speed usually improves dramatically. Learn the differences between incremental and full backup strategies
Incremental jobs only care about:
- New e-mails
- Updated files
- Updated SharePoint content
- Switches teams
- User activity since previous backup
This allows organisations to keep protection effective as environments continue to grow.
How to Duplicate Offsite
Do not rely on a single location for enterprise backup storage.
Most large organisations adhere to variations of the 3-2-1 backup methodology. See how to build a 3-2-1 backup strategy using Synology solutions
- 3 copies of data
- Two sites of storage for
- One offsite copy
Typical replication models
Organisations often use:
Secondary Synology Replication
Backup repositories are replicated to a second Synology system in a second site. View how to configure snapshot replication on Synology NAS systems
Data Center Recovery Sites
The organization has geographically separate recovery sites.
Security in Hybrid Cloud
Critical backup data is replicated to cloud repositories, while maintaining local recovery ability. Explore how hybrid cloud integration enhances modern data protection strategies
These strategies help to improve resilience to ransomware, hardware failures, and site-level disasters.
Lessons from Education and Large Institutions
Education organisations often have similar problems to enterprises.
Protected by thousands of institutions:
- Schüler
- Faculty
- Administration staff
- Alumni stories
has to balance growth, retention and cost control.
Deployments like Western Reserve Academy show how organisations can centralise backup management while meeting long-term retention requirements for large user populations.
Why Large Microsoft 365 Tenants Should Consider Synology
Benefits of Synology Active Backup for Microsoft 365 for large organisations:
- Centralised management
- No license for account scalability
- granular recovery capabilities
- Use storage more efficiently
- Flexible retention policies
- Ownership of local backups
- Offsite replication strategies incorporation
With these capabilities, organisations can scale their Microsoft 365 protection without continually increasing backup costs per user. Understand how to Scale enterprise M365 backups with Synology solutions.
Best Practices for Enterprise M365 Backup Deployment
Organizations planning to deploy Microsoft 365 protection at scale should consider:
- Correct NAS sizing
- Predict storage growth
- Backup job split
- Periodic testing of recoveries
- Offsite replication planning
- Hardening security
- Retention policies for a long period
Such practices help to keep backup environments efficient as user populations grow.
About Synology Solutions
With Active Backup for Microsoft 365, Synology offers scalable Microsoft 365 protection that helps organisations protect Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams data from a centralised platform. Combined with storage optimisation, replication technologies and flexible retention policies, Synology empowers enterprises to build resilient backup environments that can support thousands of users.
Epis Technology
Epis Technology assists organisations with the design, deployment, and optimisation of large-scale Synology backup environments. Services include infrastructure assessments, storage planning, Microsoft 365 backup architecture, disaster recovery consulting, replication planning, and business continuity services.
Epis Technology leverages Synology expertise and enterprise-grade backup strategies to assist organisations in enhancing recovery readiness, minimising operational complexity, and establishing scalable data protection environments to facilitate long-term growth.