What Microsoft Protects vs What You Must Protect
A lot of companies switch to Microsoft 365 because they think that using the cloud automatically makes their data safer. This assumption often means that backup coverage, recovery planning, and compliance readiness are not complete. To protect business data, avoid downtime, and lower legal risk, it’s important to know exactly where Microsoft’s responsibility ends and yours begins.
What the Shared Responsibility Model Means
There is a shared responsibility model for Microsoft 365. Microsoft keeps the cloud platform safe and up to date, but customers are still in charge of keeping their own data safe, managing it, and getting it back if it is lost. This model is the same for all cloud providers, and Microsoft’s service documentation makes it very clear, but people often get it wrong.
What Microsoft Keeps Safe at the Infrastructure Level
Microsoft is in charge of the physical and technical parts of Microsoft 365. This includes data centers all over the world, physical security, hardware redundancy, power, cooling, and network availability. Microsoft also protects the cloud platform itself from big infrastructure failures and widespread cyberattacks.
Microsoft provides high availability and resilience at this level so that services like OneDrive, Exchange Online, and SharePoint are always available.
What Microsoft Protects on the Platform Level
Microsoft takes care of operating systems, service updates, and security patches at the platform level. This includes keeping the Microsoft 365 apps safe, applying security updates, and making sure that any holes in the platform are fixed.
Microsoft also offers service-level resiliency, like geo-redundancy and data replication across regions. These protections help keep data safe from hardware failures or outages at the data center. Learn how encryption works to keep your data safe.
What Microsoft Offers for Keeping Data
Microsoft 365 comes with basic features for keeping and recovering data. Some examples are recycle bins, limited version history, and retention policies that can be changed. These tools help keep data safe for a short time and meet eDiscovery and compliance needs.
What Microsoft Doesn’t Do to Keep You Safe
Microsoft doesn’t protect businesses from losing data because of users, insiders, or attackers who are using valid accounts. Microsoft sees it as okay for someone with access to delete, overwrite, encrypt, or corrupt data unless retention policies get in the way.
Microsoft does not offer full, independent backups that customers can restore whenever they want. There is no built-in way to roll back an entire tenant, restore data to a clean point in time, or do fast granular restores across all services. See how data scrubbing improves storage reliability and safety.
What You Need to Keep Safe as a Customer
It is up to customers to keep their Microsoft 365 data safe. This includes emails, files, content for working together, and user accounts on Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams.
You need to make backups that are separate from the Microsoft tenant. These backups should let you restore specific files, keep them for a long time, and get your data back from ransomware, insider actions, or accidental deletions.
Why Backup and Retention Are Not the Same
Retention keeps data for compliance. Backup gets data back for operations. This difference is very important.
Retention tools are hard to use, take a long time to work, and aren’t made for quick recovery. Backup solutions are designed to be fast, flexible, and easy to use during emergencies. When retention is used as a backup, recovery can take longer and operations can be disrupted. View how air-gapped backups defend Microsoft 365 from attacks.
How Backups Help with Ransomware Recovery
Ransomware is more and more going after cloud data instead of just endpoints. Retention policies may keep unusable versions of files if they keep encrypted or corrupted data. If you don’t have clean backup copies from before the attack, it will be hard or impossible to get back to normal.
Being compliant does not mean being recoverable
Just because you meet compliance requirements doesn’t mean your business will keep going. An organization may be compliant but unable to quickly restore important data to keep things running.
To be truly resilient, you need both compliance controls and operational backups that work in the real world.
The effects on business of not understanding responsibility
Companies that only use Microsoft’s built-in security features often have longer downtimes, higher legal costs, and worse reputations after incidents. Delays in recovery can have an effect on customers, partners, and legal obligations. See why Synology’s built-in security features suit businesses best.
Making a full plan for protecting Microsoft 365
A full strategy includes both Microsoft’s platform protections and customer-controlled protections. This includes backups that are separate from each other, regular testing of recovery plans, clear rules about how long data should be kept, and written procedures for responding to incidents.
A little bit about Epis Technology
Epis Technology offers cloud backup, enterprise IT infrastructure, and data protection solutions that help businesses fill in the holes in the Microsoft shared responsibility model. The company focuses on business continuity planning, Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace backups, Synology-based storage platforms, air-gapped and immutable backup designs, and more. Learn about integrating Synology for seamless Google Workspace backup.