Written by Tony Klinger
Resiliency is the ability to have your systems readily available, always available, or able to be maintained through an instant failover. Continuity is the ability to have data integrity and to protect your data from corruption. Resiliency gives you fast recovery/failover like driving a fast Ferrari, whereas the strength of continuity and reliable data protection will be there when you need it, like the city bus. With this understanding, let’s talk about Office 365.
A large majority of businesses are choosing to transfer their email exchange deployments to Office 365. This is a great strategy used to simplify email management. Running email in the cloud is an easy way to reduce hardware in the data center while also increasing email availability. Many O365 customers believe that their emails are protected due to the fact that they are in the cloud and that O365 is protected across multiple Azure Regions (areas of the country East/West). The bigger concern is that they are only protected at a Resiliency level. O365 does absolutely nothing for continuity. In order to truly protect the O365 environment the customer must do Continuity protect of the emails. There are multiple products on the market that can do this and provide complete data protection.
Statistically, email infiltration is the most common security threat to date and is becoming even more of an issue due to lack of updated security infrastructure and human error. Social engineering and convincing email formatting can fool even the best of us into downloading malware onto our devices. Such infiltration of email data can slow or even bring organizational operations to a halt.
Don’t let the lack of continuity in Office 365 lead to an email recovery disaster.