Why SharePoint Data Requires a Dedicated Backup Plan

Organizations worldwide consider Microsoft SharePoint to be the central nervous system of their enterprise. It contains project files, intranet sites, and other vital collaboration documents. What’s surprising is that a large number of such organizations are living with a false sense of security. They believe that because their data is stored in the cloud, Microsoft is protecting it against all forms of loss. 

While the cloud does provide better availability of data, it does not provide immunity to all forms of loss. Microsoft operates under a shared responsibility model. This means that they are only responsible for ensuring the infrastructure is up and running. They are not responsible for the integrity of the data within that infrastructure. 

Without a dedicated backup plan, businesses are leaving themselves open to forms of data loss that native tools are simply not capable of resolving. For true protection, organizations should implement a backup SharePoint site strategy to secure their critical data.

The Limitations of Native Protection

Microsoft does provide tools that are meant to assist in the recovery of lost data. Tools such as the recycle bin are meant to assist with short-term recovery scenarios. This means recovering files that were deleted yesterday. While such tools are certainly useful in the short term, they are woefully inadequate in the long term. The recycle bin has a limited retention period. It deletes files permanently after 93 days. Once that time is up, or if an administrator hard deletes the files, the files are lost forever. While such tools are convenient, they are not a disaster recovery plan. They are simply a short-term convenience. 

The Real Risks to Your Data

Data loss in SharePoint rarely occurs as a result of server failures from Microsoft’s side. Instead, most risks come from the user side. The most common data loss occurs as a result of accidental deletion. A user might accidentally delete an important folder or overwrite a file with incorrect data, which may not be detected until the data expires at the end of the retention period.

Ransomware is an external threat to data loss in SharePoint. Ransomware has been upgraded to target cloud-based data. For example, if a user’s device is infected by ransomware, it can sync encrypted data to SharePoint, thereby denying an organization access to its data in the cloud. In such cases, native versioning might be helpful, but sophisticated ransomware can compromise this as well.

Synchronization errors can cause data integrity problems as well. A sync tool might fail between a user’s desktop and SharePoint’s cloud environment, thereby corrupting data and creating conflict data, which might overwrite correct data. Without a pristine copy to revert to, such sync problems can cause data loss as well.

Redundancy Is Not a Backup

One thing business leaders often get confused about is redundancy and having a true data backup. They might not understand that having data replicated to multiple geographic locations by Microsoft is not having a true data backup. They might not know that redundancy is simply having data replicated to multiple locations to ensure business continuity. For example, in case one data center goes offline, business can continue as usual by accessing data from an alternative location.

However, redundancy provides no protection from corruption or deletion. If the original file is corrupted by ransomware or deleted by the user, the changes are immediately duplicated to all the redundant files. What we have is a series of corrupted files. A backup is a copy of your data that is separate from the source. This isolation allows you to restore a clean copy of your environment from a certain point in time before the damage was done.

What to Look for in a Solution

In selecting a third-party backup solution for your SharePoint platform, you need to consider specific features to ensure the continuity of your business. For instance, you need a solution that provides granular recovery capabilities to restore individual items such as files and list items without requiring you to restore the entire site collection. You should also consider a solution with unlimited retention policies to avoid the 93-day retention policy imposed by Microsoft. 

What’s more, you need a solution that can store the data in a different cloud infrastructure to ensure that if the primary environment fails, the backup will not be affected.

Secure Your Critical Intelligence

Your SharePoint platform contains the critical intelligence of your company. You cannot afford to leave your data vulnerable to human errors, malicious attacks, and synchronizing issues, which are common with the default backup solution. By using a dedicated backup solution, you are not limited to the default retention policies and are in total control of your business continuity!