Comments on: GitLab Data Loss Lessons for Office 365 Customers

By: Joshua Bines

Joshua Bines — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:04:35 +0000

Like many things it’s a business question.

Detail the real world impacts of an outage ideally monetize the value.

What is most important to the business, client connectivity or data? If you had to prioritize one over the other which would you choose?

For the service provider consider their reputation in regard to failures and outages. How well is your data protected is a outage likely? Compare your real world cost and the compensation provided from a service outage. (I haven’t had a chance to check this for 365 agreements? )

To often a fear of IT management loosing their jobs or having their reputation affected leads to purchasing solutions which add no real benefit.

Re: 365 groups. The above mentioned may assist maybe all they care about is knowing the data is safe in another location and accessable. When might this be applicable?

Well… there is only two examples of data lost that come to mind.

A undetected issue with the lag copy replication combined with a database corruption.
An act of war ( as take up of 365 by government departments increase such a step becomes more and more likely )

Just a few of my thoughts.
JB

By: Chas

Chas — Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:59:18 +0000

I’ve been testing cloud backup products as of late namely SkyKick (available only to MS partners) and Spanning.

I am quite happy with the Exchange Online backup side of things, I think it works quite well. The OneDrive restores seems to be the only shortfall at this stage where file versions, sharing and metadata (modified by etc) is lost upon a restore across both vendors.

Some companies still don’t have a presence in a particular country and some vendors are slow to bring Sharepoint backups to their suite.

Cloud backup is a must – people have been told incorrect information about their data in the cloud.

By: Mat C

Mat C — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 22:56:57 +0000

I feel marketing has a big part to play in all of this as we’re constantly reassured the cloud is safe and that best practices are being used hence creating a false sense of what is actually been done for us as the marketing never really explains what is being done in any real detail.

While the security aspect for services like O365 are up to scratch the backup and archiving options simply aren’t. From my experience I recommend using 3rd party tools for backup & archiving in O365. Test them thoroughly for capability and reliability prior to committing to them.

Just because you are using cloud services doesn’t mean you can simply set and forget as many suggest. As engineers & managers we still have a duty to ensure that the data being trusted to a cloud service is protected and recoverable to the extent our clients expect.

By: Michael Donovan

Michael Donovan — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 19:28:49 +0000

The only thing that surprises me about this article is that it was not discussed sooner. It always seems to take a disaster to get focus on an issue.
Any mailbox not in a in-hold retention policy is lost when you exceed the deleted item retention limit. Even if you extend the retention times to maximum values (for example, 30 days on shared mailboxes) you’re still out of luck on day 31. We were guided to replace our public folders with shared mailboxes. The big difference now is the recovery options are dramatically different. Either license the shared mailbox and put an in-place hold on it, or live with the 30 day limit. (You may want enable auditing when you up the retention. My experience has been that the first question I report that I can recover the data is “who deleted the content?”)
Don’t get me wrong, I love the cloud. Escaping mailbox limits (and by extension PST’s) is good enough reason to make the move. But archiving and backups are still needed IMHO. When that old data is no where to be found, people are unhappy. Accidental deletions are not always found in 30 days (much less 14 days.)
Its hard to sell the need for archiving and backups. But like security, it only takes one big loss to rationalize the ongoing costs of retaining older data. Don’t get rid of the backups yet. And this is only mailboxes. Mercifully DL’s and contacts will be much easier to backup.
PS-I am not a backup administrator.

By: Mark Aiken

Mark Aiken — Thu, 09 Feb 2017 16:32:02 +0000

The inability for clients to know with certainty where their data is being stored geographically is a major deterrent for some industries with strict governance (legal, medical, military etc).
Lack of easy granular restore capability for email and DB content is a major setback as well. The anonymity of control and accountability also makes many clients reluctant to make the leap.