Arcserve Southern Africa has revealed why third-party protection is essential for companies deploying Office 365.
“It is a common market misconception that Office 365 applications are safeguarded from external cyber threats,” says Byron Horn Botha, Arcserve Southern Africa lead: channel and partnerships.
“Businesses must understand that controlling Office 365 data is their responsibility, as is protecting their Exchange Online email from ransomware, malware, and hackers. Without a third-party data protection solution in place, they won’t have the ability to access a separate copy of their data should an employee act on an email that turns out to be a scam.”
He says a common scenario is one where employees inadvertently respond to bogus emails without verifying the source of the mail and as such open the company to phishing scams.
Horn-Botha notes external security attacks and data breaches can wreak havoc at organisations, causing crushing financial blows to an organisation’s bottom line and irreparable damage to their brand.
“Furthermore, the company may be held accountable for heavy fines due to regulatory compliance and data privacy, as mandated by PoPIA, if internal and customer data is affected,” he adds.
He highlights one of the most common causes of data theft is through ex-employees where accounts were deleted to save on licensing costs for inactive users.
“This is fairly common but what happens if an employee decides to take legal action against the company after an extended period. Under these circumstances’ businesses are required to produce information in respect of the dispute.
“Here again there is often the assumption that Office 365 has built-in Litigation Hold – so all is well. But is it? The answer is ‘quite the opposite’.
“Many organisations are motivated to delete old users to avoid the financial burden of paying licensing fees for past employees. This can present challenges when legal disputes arise because deleting a user means their personal SharePoint site and OneDrive account is gone forever.
“And, while Litigation Hold is a safeguard put in place by Microsoft to reduce the risk of losing data, it can’t take the place of third-party data protection to address compliance requirements and regulations.”
He confirms the only way to avoid this situation plus the resulting costly impact of legal fees and fines is to stay prepared and ensure third-party protection is in place.
Arcserve makes Office 365 protection a reality with its UDP solution. “Customers benefit from the most complete set of data protection capabilities available for Office 365, including: complete support for the critical Office 365 services: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business. These benefits are augmented by deduplication capabilities and compression with strong AES encryption.
“Flexible storage support and licensing options are made to suit the needs of the business. There is also streamlined, unified management interface for an integrated disaster recovery plus backup, solution, and point-in-time backup and granular recovery.”
Horn-Botha urges businesspeople to take control of their Office 365 data with Arcserve and protect their priceless data.