Microsoft Office 365 is one of the leading business productivity suites in the world right now. If we talk about current statistics, almost 40% of businesses are either using Office 365 or planning to move to it. After having a look at the current scenario, we can say that Office 365 will keep growing.
It might be possible that your organization is also planning to switch to Office 365 or is already using it. Microsoft offers various plans according to organization’s requirements that contain different series of applications. Although, there is one common application for email communication i.e. OWA – Outlook Web Access.
Email message is one of the most convenient ways to get in touch with all the employees in the organization. So, the importance of emails does not need any further explanation.
Now, the next question which comes in user’s mind is that how secure is Microsoft Office 365 email? This might sound odd to some users as O365 is a cloud-based suite. But online threats have increased a lot nowadays that even cloud storage is not safe.
We will recommend the users that O365 email cloud is not 100% free of security risks. There can be a data loss situation, and everyone should accept it. To know more, go through the following section to find out why users want to know how secure Office 365 mail is and why we cannot claim it to be completely secure.
1. Internal Threats – Any employee can turn hostile anytime and it can result into intentional deletion of crucial business emails. In current data retention policy offered by Microsoft, there is not special protection policy for intentional deletion. It is considered as normal deletion as done in case of any other deletion.
Thus, if intentionally deleted crucial emails are not recovered before the default retention time frame, an organization might lose crucial data permanently.
2. External Threats – According to a recent survey, almost 90% of the online attacks are targeted via emails. And this can happen on various cloud-based email clients like Office 365 as well. Additionally, all these ransomware attacks also happened on O365 accounts as well.
So, you just cannot think that your crucial email data on cloud are safe and secure. Therefore, all these factors make users think that is Office 365 mail secure or not.
3. Accidental Loss – Other than these two threats, another possible reason can be accidental loss of data. This can happen while deleting hundreds of unnecessary emails from your account and accidentally deleting important emails as well.
If you are lucky enough and notice those deleted emails before they exceed the data retention limit of Office 365, then you can recover them from Deleted Items folder. Otherwise, those accidentally deleted emails will be lost forever.
If your organization is planning to move to O365 or is currently using it, so you should opt for it or stay there only. Instead of opting out, users must find out solutions to secure their crucial cloud data. Like any other cloud-based email service, having backup of Office 365 data is the best way to ensure data security. Having data backup on regular intervals can be extremely useful for organizations in case of data loss.
Once you have an idea that how important it is for the organizations/users to have Office 365 backup, you might be thinking the ways to do the same. Thus, the following section describes a solution to backup Office 365 mailbox to PST format. This application is capable enough to backup user mailbox as well as shared mailbox.
Using this tool, users can store a backup copy of their crucial data on their local system or external storage. Moreover, users can also save O365 contacts, calendar, tasks as well along with email data. Another important feature of this tool is that it offers category-based and date-based filters as well to backup only important data.
Although Office 365 suite is the class leading email service offered by Microsoft, even it is not 100% from cyber-attacks. Additionally, intentional or accidental deletion can also be a serious issue for the organizations. Thus, the users who have queries like how secure Microsoft Office 365 email cloud is, will get their solution here. The backup tool can help them to save their data into some storage device for emergency purpose.