As we all know, the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally changed the way that many of us work.
With workplaces closing their doors during lockdown, many previously office-based employees had to quickly move online to work remotely from home or in a hybrid role.
And while it certainly isn’t right to talk about ‘winners’ from such a difficult 12 months, Microsoft Teams has certainly become an increasingly central part of many of our working lives. Many organisations now use it to collaborate on projects and documents, and to communicate with colleagues on a daily basis.
In October 2020 alone, Microsoft Teams reached a remarkable 115 million daily active users (DAU).
Microsoft Teams has been a lifeline for many organisations, and has played a critical part of keeping their people engaged and their businesses running effectively through an incredibly tough period.
Even now, as we begin to emerge from lockdown restrictions, it is clear that remote and hybrid working are here to stay. Increasing numbers of people say they want to work more flexibly. According to the experts at HR News, 86% of UK employees now want to work remotely at least once a week.
How safe is your Microsoft Teams data?
It seems fair to assume that many of those people will be using Microsoft Teams to work remotely or in a hybrid role. And it is no surprise – Microsoft Teams is a great product. But with increasing amounts of data now being shared on Teams, just how easy would it be to replace that data in the event of something going wrong?
The answer is not quite as easy as you might think.
The main reason for this is that Microsoft Teams doesn’t take your information and store it in a dedicated Teams folder as you might expect it to. Microsoft Teams is just one part of a complex ecosystem of other Microsoft products and services. As a result, it stores your data in a variety of different places. The real challenge is that those locations depend on the feature you are using.
Here are a couple of examples:
- Any Chat messages you send are stored in Exchange folders. However, every single team and channel you create is stored on a separate site within SharePoint folders.
- A file sent directly to a colleague is stored in a ‘Microsoft Teams Chat Files’ section in the user’s personal OneDrive. Send that same file within a channel to multiple colleagues however, and it ends up in the SharePoint document library.
All of this means it can be awkward to backup your Microsoft Teams data effectively. And crucially, if your systems are attacked or compromised it is also easy to miss vital data during a restore.
The bottom line? A nasty surprise for many organisations if things go wrong.
How to ensure your Microsoft Teams backup is safe
So what is the answer to this challenge? Of course, one option is to try and create your own back up system in-house.
But as we’ve talked about before, this is something that is time consuming and inefficient to do. Many organisations struggle to find the resources to back up their data effectively. Often, those that do manage it then only discover the limits of their disaster recovery systems when the worst happens.
In addition to this, creating your own back up process is also particularly difficult to do with Teams, for reasons we’ve explained above.
Our solution to keeping your Microsoft Teams data safe and easily available for restoring from backup is to use the ‘complete backup’ function within CloudCover 365.
CloudCover 365 is our Microsoft 365 backup solution within our CloudCover backup suite. The latest version now includes a purpose-built backup and recovery for all of your Microsoft Teams data. This means that if you do need to find and restore all of your Teams data – even from specific channels and settings – then it is quick and easy to do. Here is a quick overview of some of the key features:
- Easily restore individual Microsoft Teams files or entire folders using the CloudCover 365 portal
- Utilise unlimited repositories and keep sensitive data archived with no Microsoft purge time limits
- Restore files or folders to a local zip file, its original location or by emailing it to an individual employee.
By using this function within CloudCover 365, you have full control and protection over all of your Teams data, including entire teams, specific channels and settings.
The solution gives you a faster and easier way to recover your Teams data when you need to – allowing for far more seamless governance and compliance processes if you need to access specific data quickly.
With our reliance on Microsoft Teams only likely to increase in the future, having an effective backup and restore option is more important than ever before.
Need some help?
You can find out more about the Microsoft Teams backup function within our CloudCover 365 solution here.
Want to talk to us to find out more about how we can help you to keep your data safe as you move to remote and hybrid working? We would be happy to talk through the options with you.
Call us today on +44 (0)3453 888 327 to discuss your specific needs, or email enquiries@virtualDCS.co.uk.
