Office 365 backups and You

Soo many options???

I’m not going to cover what Loryan Strant covered in his post about backing up Office 365. You can read it here. What we have all been wondering since receiving test units from Synology to test drive their Active Backup for Office 365 solution, was why??

I mean, like Loryan mentioned, there are a ton of vendors out there, selling Office 365 backup solutions. Companies like Mimecast, that have been doing Exchange backups since the beginning of time, Veeam, AvePoint, etc. They all do it. They all do it rather well and its all cloud based so no hardware is required. What was the point behind Synology getting into the Office 365 backup game?

I have a few thoughts on the subject, after spending the last two months with the DS920+:

1. Simplification — Most vendors out there that offer online backups have portals AND licenses AND config’s AND user access permission requirements, and you end up having to consider
   a.) where your data is being stored,
   b.) how it is being stored and
   c.) who has access to it outside of your organisation.
   With Active Backup for Office 365, from Synology, YOU own the hardware that it gets backed up to. Its why Synology sent us their newly released DS920+ NAS . You purchase any of their devices and you get Active Backup for Office 365 for free. Read that again, FOR FREE. There are no perpetual license fees for it. Its yours, forever, because you bought a NAS. Have a look here for a list of supported devices.
2. Portability — Yes, pick up and go. The DS920+ is smaller than a mITX PC. It has 4 internal bays (64 TB), expandable to 9 (144 TB) through an expansion unit. No longer do you have to worry about carrying out a server should you move to another building, (companies are doing this all the time, especially now, during COVID). It consumes very little power (109.84 BTU/hr at full load).
3. Ease of use — As Loryan mentioned in his post, this is what really intrigued me. Plug in, navigate to the portal, the management console is discoverable on your network and presto, you are in.

Synology NAS portal

From there, you select the application you want to install and follow the process. (Loryan’s post covers the backup steps and configuration)

Package Center

I managed to backup approximately 130GB in about 4 and a half hours.

Active Backup Task progress

4. Accessibility — Once backed up, you can allow users to recover their own data through the Active Backup end user portal which you get to decide if you want to make available to users.

So why would any company want to have a cloud service backup on-prem? Surely they moved to the cloud for all the reasons why companies move to the cloud?

• Cost — this is arguably the cheapest Office 365 backup solution available in the market currently
• Ownership — Its your device. You take it with you, there is no vendor lock in. You can export the data yourself should you want to move your backups off Synology and onto another platform
• Multi-cloud backup — There are many organisations that not only use Office 365. Synology offers a host of other supported backup services, including on-prem as well as other cloud services like G Suite.
• Its more than just for Office 365 — The uses of Synology NAS, through their extensive application ecosystem, provides organisations with a single view into their backup/storage/syncing strategy. You can drop Gib repo’s onto it, use it as a file server, A RADUIS Server, the list is exhaustive.
• SME/SMB market — With Microsoft positioning its M365 Business plans for smaller organisations, the Synology range of NAS/backup devices are perfectly suited for companies that do not have the budget or need for enterprise priced backup solutions.

Synology offers end to end storage and backup solutions for every possible scenario. I would highly recommend that companies explore this, before getting caught into other platforms that are licensed perpetually and that are almost impossible to export your data should you want to leave.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with backup solutions for your Microsoft Tenant so please comment here or reach out to me on Twitter.

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Be cool my ninjas.