If you are one of the many companies embracing Microsoft Office 365, you may not realize there is a risk that your data could be lost. With Office 365, all your data, including emails, calendars, groups and files, live in a Microsoft cloud that is beyond your control. Does it matter? After all, Microsoft offers a financially backed guarantee of 99.9% uptime with state-of-the-art redundancy at every layer. But scratch beneath the surface and you’ll find good reasons to back up your Office 365 data to a central backup repository in your own secure data center or a trusted third party service provider’s data center.

A report commissioned by veeam highlights that there is a common misconception that SaaS data in the cloud is inherently safe, such as Microsoft Office 365.

A large percentage of organisations are still not aware of the following risks areas regarding Office 365:

• Compliance. Many organizations fall under strict email and document retention regulations, where failure to comply can lead to expensive fines or worse. By default, deleted Office 365 data is non-recoverable after a maximum of 30 days. If your Office 365 subscription is ever cancelled, all your data is automatically deleted after 90 days.
• Liability. The Office 365 terms of service currently limit Microsoft’s liability to $5,000 or your last 12 months subscription fees should anything happen to your data— assuming you can prove it was Microsoft’s fault.
• Audit Rights. The Office 365 terms of service give you no audit rights. This is problematic if, as part of an audit, you are required to show the physical location where your data is stored. Maintaining a backup copy of your Office 365 data in a secure location that you are able to audit may be an acceptable way to work around this problem.