The COVID-19 pandemic has caused millions of people to start working from home for the first time.  Office 365 is ideal for this use case – it was built with remote and mobile workers in mind.  The applications can be downloaded or used online, the subscription supports multiple installations and mobile apps, and collaboration is easy thanks to the sharing features in each app. Additionally, in this time of great change, there is enormous value in workers using familiar tools – workers will be able to use the same Office 365 that they have been using in the office.  

The Office 365 platform has so many applications that many workers can perform most of their work entirely within this suite.  IT teams like the platform because it's easy to adopt and deploy, and Microsoft is responsible for keeping the online applications updated. With that said, you still need to do some things to protect your data.

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Back up your data

Reasons to backup Office 365 data

Working from home may disrupt employees’ normal pattern of accessing and saving files. Microsoft Office 365 includes OneDrive for Business, so users have 1 TB space to save, sync, and share files. OneDrive is a cloud storage application that offers a desktop client for easy access. Administrators can configure remote devices to save data to the OneDrive Documents library so that it synchronizes to the company's OneDrive account. This lets the system administrator access and manage the data, and back up the data in the Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup system.

Many users are just now becoming familiar with Microsoft Teams. Teams usage is up 40% in recent weeks. It’s understandable as Teams is a communication and collaboration platform that combines persistent workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration. 

Office 365 also includes SharePoint Online, which is an intranet application that allows users to manage documents, create workflows, manage projects, and more.

It’s important to save your remote worker’s content to a centralized location – you don’t want to have a scenario where vital work is only saved to a remote laptop.

Beyond training remote workers to share and save data, IT should also be running an independent 3rd party backup of this data. There are several reasons to back up Office 365 data, including the fact that this recommendation is a part of the Microsoft Service Agreement:

 It’s also very important to be able to manage backups easily. Can you manage and restore data remotely? You don’t want IT workers to have to go into the office to add capacity, look at reporting, or do routine tasks such as restoring data. Now would also be a bad time to have to worry about native retention policies or data quotas.

How Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup can help

All of the data in these applications should be backed up to a third-party backup solution. Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup was made for this purpose and backs up the following Office 365 data with unlimited storage and retention, and an online remote management console with full functionality:

Exchange Online — all email messages, including all attachments, and the complete folder structure of each user's mailbox

OneDrive for Business — all files under the Documents Library, including the entire folder structure

SharePoint Online files and folders in Document Libraries, Site Page Libraries, and Picture Libraries in any of the following:

Modern Team Sites

Communication Sites

Team Sites

Publishing Sites

Wiki Sites

Office 365 Teams — all your mail, calendar, and site data, along with file data shared within the Team associated with the group membership.