Welcome, Microsoft 365 Backup!

Microsoft has unique access to back up data – Keepit offers a unique guarantee that you can get to it without losing control of costs.

I had the good fortune to have the early part of my career coincide with a time of huge battles in the computing world. The competition between Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Lotus, Oracle, Sun, Netscape, and other titans was fascinating, and often entertaining, to watch. For every example of bare-knuckle (or flat-out anti-competitive) brawling, there are stories of humor and grace, like the fleet of buses adorned with Lotus logos that Lotus hired when Microsoft brought the Microsoft Exchange Conference to their hometown of Boston.

It’s in that spirit that I write this blog post congratulating Microsoft on the general availability of Microsoft 365 Backup and the underlying storage layer that powers it, Microsoft 365 Backup Storage (MBS).

We know how important business continuity is for the enterprise. Since Keepit’s first cloud backup offering in 2016, we’ve been helping our customers protect their SaaS application data. During that time, the backup market has matured, and so have customers. An increasing number of enterprises understand how critical it is to have data protection for their most important SaaS applications.

Here at Keepit, we’re excited to see Microsoft reach this important milestone. Let me tell you why. 

The discussion is shifting

We are obviously fierce advocates for enterprise data management and protection. It is literally the single thing that our entire platform was built to deliver. We have had some frank and open discussions with our more than 10,000 customers around the world to help them understand the value of protecting their SaaS application and control plane data.

Sometimes reaching this understanding has been an uphill battle, though, because Microsoft has delivered some native data protection capabilities such as the mechanism of recycle bin recovery options — which is not backup — but has been considered good enough to satisfy many customers over the years. Lately, the discussion is changing with the increased recognition that you, the customer, are responsible for ensuring the security and availability of your own SaaS control plane and application data in a world that is increasingly insecure. Your SaaS vendor can do a lot to help you, but ultimately, it’s your organization’s responsibility. You ignore that at your peril. 

Going legit

Having Microsoft formally enter the backup market themselves is important for another reason. Microsoft's own estimates say that more than 90% of their enterprise customers don't have backup in place. From my own discussions with enterprise customers around the world, a surprising number of them do not have complete disaster recovery capability for their most important cloud applications. Some of this gap is because organizations historically have not understood their part in the shared responsibility model. But some of it comes from a mistaken belief that "if Microsoft doesn't make a product for it, it isn't important." We’ve seen this same belief play out in other contexts like antivirus, compliance, and email hygiene. As soon as Microsoft commits resources and talent to delivering a new capability, enterprises perk up and start asking great questions about whether they need the shiny new thing.

The Microsoft platform advantage

Microsoft has invested decades of engineering experience and knowledge into the Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Power Platform, and Dynamics 365 platforms. Because they have complete control over and visibility into every aspect of those platforms, their first-party backup solution delivers some great technical capabilities, including high restore speeds at large scale and great data fidelity. The combination of database level backup for SharePoint and OneDrive and copy-on-write backup for Exchange Online gives customers a powerful new tool for large-scale recovery. No other vendor can provide the same direct capabilities because none of us are "inside the blue curtain." We just do not have the same access to the platform that Microsoft does.

Because Microsoft understands that different enterprises around the world have different requirements, they have made the critical, and welcome, decision to offer their backup storage system as a platform that third parties can use.

Keepit is proud to be partnering with Microsoft to build support for Microsoft 365 Backup Storage into our native platform for an integrated backup and recovery solution that offers great customer value:  While Microsoft has unique access to their platform, what we contribute is unique separation of environments and guaranteed access to data: With data stored in the independent Keepit cloud, customers retain access even if they lose access to Microsoft.

Making “better together” a reality

The Keepit platform today offers fast, immutable, independent, always-online storage that protects Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and more—built on a platform that delivers award-winning ease of use and a transparent and easily understood and predictable pricing model. We are adding support for Microsoft 365 Backup Storage so that you can flexibly choose to add rapid-restore protection for your most critical Microsoft 365 assets.

This combination gives you the best of both worlds: Keepit’s reliable, broad, and inexpensive protection for every asset, plus fast, full-scale restores from Microsoft, all managed through a single console. Keepit protects the full range of critical objects, including conditional access policies, application registrations, users, mailboxes, SharePoint sites, Teams channels, Microsoft 365 Groups, CRM data, and more; Microsoft 365 Backup Storage adds rapid-restore protection for the object types they protect.

Future best practice?

For customers, the perfect backup setup for Microsoft 365 will be this: A full, immutable, logically and physically separate backup of all of Microsoft 365 and Entra ID in Keepit, with extra restore capabilities of critical data sets in Microsoft 365 Backup Storage. In this setup, customers can keep costs under control, and have guaranteed access to all data, in the event of losing access to Microsoft tenants or administrator credentials.

Where next?

Our integration with Microsoft 365 Backup Storage is currently in private preview  and we are rolling this feature out to eligible customers soon. Joining the preview is the best way to engage with our product team and give us feedback during the adoption cycle. This initial integration is just the start—as part of our overall initiative to deliver more intelligent guided data protection, we  are able to leverage the combined strengths of Microsoft and Keepit’s respective platforms. That puts Keepit in a unique position to leverage key intelligence from customer tenants to both recommend backup configuration and to intelligently provide access and provide “Guided Recovery” when needed.

Some examples of what  Keepit’s integrated solution will deliver over time: 

• Keepit will suggest which data items might benefit from rapid restore protection, using data about activity and cost to intelligently balance recovery time, coverage, and cost. 
• When a user requests a restore, Keepit will know exactly where to retrieve the data from to get it back both completely and quickly.  
• Seamless integrated restore across both storage platforms, allowing one-click restore of Entra ID alongside Microsoft 365 data 
• Automatic migration of data between platforms to provide cost-effective long-term data preservation giving you the right protection for the different types of data you have at the right cost. 
• Integrated auditing and management to help define, monitor, and enforce backup and compliance policies

We have lots more planned that we’ll be sharing as planning and development advance.  

If you’re interested in joining the preview program, or learning more about Keepit’s data protection platform, visit https://www.keepit.com.