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Having a lot of data in the cloud is a fairly common thing for small and medium businesses these days. The convenience is pretty obvious; users of OneDrive or SharePoint, for example, see their cloud files in the same interfaces as the local files on their machine. Once the files are saved, they’re accessible with any device they have signed in to their account and can be shared with people in and out of their organization with just a few clicks.

These cloud files are your business’ files… but what happens if Microsoft or another cloud provider for business data deletes your files? Today, we’ll take a look at the ownership of cloud files, who’s responsible for data loss in the cloud, and what your business can do to keep your cloud data available and safe.

Reading the Fine Print

If your business already uses a cloud provider like Microsoft (through 365), you might be somewhat surprised that their terms and conditions clearly state that they cannot be held responsible for loss of cloud data. As the provider of a service, the data may be misplaced or deleted with little to no recourse for the problem. Instead, the service level agreement has more to do with the availability of the service and not a guarantee that your data will be handled perfectly.

It’d be nice if there were a guarantee that there would be exactly zero mistakes made with your cloud data. Mistakes do happen, though, and when they do, it becomes important to remember that your data is your responsibility. This is actually because you still own your company’s data, even if it’s hosted by a cloud provider. If it were the other way around, things would start to look quite a bit more frightening: if the data that you store on cloud platforms like SharePoint Online was Microsoft’s responsibility to maintain and secure your business’ data, then they’d likely have an ownership claim over the data that’s stored on their platform.

Instead, your proprietary data is your responsibility because you have all rights over the data. When choosing a place to host your company’s files, you shouldn’t have to worry about Microsoft using your data, but you do have to worry about those files being mishandled or accidentally deleted. It’s your responsibility to take extra steps to decrease the likelihood that your data can be accidentally deleted.

“365/Sharepoint Is Not a Backup”

This is a pretty common phrase around the MSP and sysadmin world. According to industry standards, you should follow the 3/2/1 rule for robust backups: three copies of your data, two backups on different media, one backup is offsite. It’s typical for companies to have their first copy be the data they’re currently working on, for them to have a backup on a server or NAS, and for them to have a copy provided by a backup provider.

Typically, the files in your OneDrive or SharePoint folders are a working copy. Under usual use cases, not all of these files are copied onto your local machine at any point. For this reason, they need their own backup in the 3/2/1 fashion. If they were files on your own file server, you’d back up that server onto two different media, sending one of them offsite. It’s hard to remember that cloud files need backup, either through downloading the files and storing them in a backup archive, or by setting up cloud-to-cloud backup.

The 3/2/1 Risk Mitigation Technique

If it’s your company’s responsibility to set up backups and keep them to ensure that your data does not fall victim to bad circumstances or misfortune, then the best thing to do is to make sure these backups are in multiple places and on multiple media. The chances that any hard disk-holding a backup copy of your data-will fail are pretty much 100%, given a long enough timeframe. The 3/2/1 strategy gives you the ability to address the somewhat high degree of failure that backup devices face by having redundancy, drastically reducing the chance that your data faces multiple failures at the same time.

If there is an accident with your SharePoint Online data, for example, having a local copy of it that can be uploaded to the service (once any concerns about the service are satisfied) would make sure that you don’t suffer too much unavailability of your data. This could take some time, but the chances that your data is deleted and that your local backup device fail, at the same time, is much lower than either event happening on their own.

Add to this another offsite backup and you again dramatically decrease the odds that the original files, your local copy, and a second cloud provider all have a failure or accident of some kind at the same time. If there are three copies in three different geographical regions, your data is much more likely to be able to survive even the most calamitous of events.

Crown Computers recommends services that do a cloud-to-cloud backup of your SharePoint Online data, because it helps achieve this much lower risk of losing your proprietary data. When the backup service is another cloud provider, the files can be backed up directly from Microsoft’s servers to another server, making the process very simple and flexible, without any interruptions to your business while the data is being backed up.

The Bottom Line

Ultimately, since the responsibility for maintaining the existence of your data is your own, you should carefully consider what would happen if your 365-hosted (OneDrive, SharePoint Online) data went away tomorrow. One of the trickiest parts of this question is answering “who at your organization uses SharePoint the most? What do they upload there?”

It’s likely the best choice for all organizations who use 365 to have the data backed up by a third party. Our team is here to help ensure the safety of your data and we can provide solutions that utilize cloud-to-cloud backup, as well as set up local backups for all of your 365 data. We recommend reaching out to us as soon as possible to make sure your cloud data is protected.

-Written by Derek Jeppsen on Behalf of Sean Goss and Crown Computers Team