Many small businesses may not be aware that the risk of data loss also extends to the cloud. As reported by the IT Compliance Policy Group, an industry research firm, 32% of businesses are impacted by data loss in the cloud. Data loss can occur from any number of causes – from accidental deletion to malicious attacks like viruses and ransomware – and the detrimental costs from these incidents can be severe, up to $120,000 on average per incident for small businesses. Leveraging a cloud service like Exchange Online thus doesn’t necessarily protect you from these threats. For this reason – and the fact that native data retention policies provided by Microsoft may not be adequate – it is just as important to backup Exchange Online data as it was when mail was being managed on-premises.

Microsoft 365 offers license-dependent data protection features including Archiving and Litigation Hold. These features are designed for compliance and litigation, not for quick search and restore of lost data.

Relying on Legal Hold to restore an email can take up to six hours, increasing support costs and reducing customer satisfaction.

The cost to restore a single email can be equal to or more than the cost of investing in an organization-wide backup solution for an entire year!

But what if you need to recover an entire folder or mailbox of a key employee and how will the delay or inability to restore data impact the relationship with your customer?

The SkyKick Exchange Online Backup service provides a number of benefits both to MSP partners and their downstream end customers – the small businesses they serve.  For partners, it helps them provide a critical and highly valued service to their end customers – one that operates much like an insurance policy for key productivity data – and which extends Microsoft native data retention policies. Specifically, it gives these partners a powerful backup tool for the critical Exchange Mail components (mail, calendars, contacts, tasks, etc) used by small businesses. Small business customers can thus quickly and accurately recover from unfortunate data loss incidents involving this mailbox data with minimal disruption, mitigating possible data loss costs.

SkyKick Exchange Online Backup is a premium data protection service for Office 365, giving partners a powerful tool to help small businesses quickly and accurately recover from productivity data loss. Its differentiating features as an Exchange Online backup solution are:

• Full backup coverage of all the Exchange Online components, including mail, calendars, shared mailboxes, contacts, tasks, notes, journals, and public folders 

• Ability to offer unlimited backup storage and retention – including deleted users 

• Powerful search and restore capabilities to quickly recover from data loss 

• Industry-leading security and privacy policy support – HIPAA and GDPR compliance at no extra charge 

• Full cloud to cloud solution built exclusively on industry-leading public cloud provider Microsoft

SkyKick Exchange Online Backup provides data protection of all the critical Exchange Online components, including mail, calendars, shared mailboxes, contacts, tasks, notes, journals, and public folders.

SkyKick Exchange Online Backup operates adjacently, but distinctly from an Exchange Online subscription. It is developed by SkyKick but operated and brought to market by partner MSPs, who offer this as an additional service to their small business customers. As a fully managed cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS), it operates seamlessly in the background for Office 365 subscribers, without the need for any onsite hardware or software. All backup data is stored in a secure and encrypted state by SkyKick on Microsoft Azure, its exclusive public cloud infrastructure provider.

Partners can try SkyKick Exchange Online Cloud Backup for free on their own Office 365 tenant by registering on SkyKick.com and then requesting an Internal Use Rights (IUR) subscription. We highly encourage this as a first step for any MSP interested in learning more about SkyKick offerings.