Microsoft 365 Backup Is Here: How Its Integration With Arcserve SaaS Backup Ensures Cost-Effective Backup and Recovery

Business continuity matters most to your business, given that any downtime can be painful and costly. With over one million customers in the United States alone who rely on Microsoft 365, we applaud the recent announcement of the general availability (GA) of Microsoft 365 Backup and its underlying backup storage platform, Microsoft 365 Backup Storage. 

At Arcserve, we aim to help customers deploy data protection strategies that ensure business continuity. That includes offering backup for Microsoft 365 SaaS data. With an increasing number of our customers recognizing how critical SaaS data protection is, we’re excited to see this new Microsoft 365 Backup solution. Here’s why.

The Conversation About SaaS Is Changing

Arcserve is laser-focused on providing effective, affordable data protection, availability, backup, and disaster recovery solutions. That’s why we want our customers worldwide to understand why they must do more to protect their SaaS application data.

Convincing them of that need hasn’t always been easy, given that Microsoft has delivered some native data protection capabilities. One example is Microsoft’s recycle bin recovery options (which, it’s important to note, aren’t backups). For many customers, that has been “good enough.”

The conversation has changed as our customers have become more aware of the shared responsibility model. The model says, in short, that Microsoft 365 data backup and recovery falls on your shoulders. So, ignoring SaaS data protection is risky at best.

Why Microsoft’s Entry Into the Backup Market Matters

Microsoft has formally entered the backup market for good reasons. The company has found that many of its customers don’t have Microsoft 365 backup solutions in place. Arcserve has also found that many of our own customers worldwide don’t have complete disaster recovery capabilities for their most essential cloud applications.

Some of this gap goes back to misunderstanding or a lack of awareness of the shared responsibility model. However, much comes from the mistaken belief that Microsoft would have already made a product to solve a problem if it were important. This same dynamic has played out in the antivirus, compliance, and email hygiene spaces. As soon as Microsoft commits resources and talent to delivering a new capability, companies perk up and ask whether they need the “latest and greatest” that Microsoft offers.

The Microsoft Platform Advantage

Microsoft has invested decades of engineering experience and knowledge into its Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Power Platform, and Dynamics 365 platforms. Because it has complete control over and visibility into every aspect of those platforms, its first-party backup solution delivers some attractive technical capabilities, including high-speed restore speeds at scale and excellent data fidelity.

The combination of database-level SharePoint and OneDrive backup and copy-on-write backup for Exchange Online gives customers a powerful new tool for large-scale recovery. No other vendor can provide the same direct capabilities because no one else has an insider’s view of the Microsoft platform.

Because Microsoft understands that different enterprises around the world have varying requirements, it has made the crucial—and welcome—decision to offer its backup storage system as a platform third parties can use.

Arcserve is proud to work with Microsoft to build support for Microsoft 365 Backup Storage into our cloud-native SaaS Backup solution. The result is an integrated backup and recovery solution that delivers exceptional customer value. While Microsoft has unique access to its platform, Arcserve SaaS Backup contributes a unique separation of environments with guaranteed access to your data. 

With your SaaS data stored in the independent Arcserve SaaS Backup cloud, you retain access even if you can’t access Microsoft.

Microsoft and Arcserve: An Unbeatable Combination

The Arcserve SaaS Backup platform offers fast, immutable, independent, always-online storage that protects Microsoft 365, Entra ID, Google Workspace, Salesforce, and other SaaS data. The solution is built to deliver award-winning ease of use and a transparent, easily understood, predictable pricing model. We are adding support for Microsoft 365 Backup Storage so you can flexibly add rapid-restore protection for your most critical Microsoft 365 data.

This combination gives you the best of both worlds: reliable, broad, and inexpensive data protection from Arcserve SaaS Backup and fast, full-scale restores from Microsoft, all managed using a single console. 

Arcserve SaaS Backup protects critical objects, including conditional access policies, application registrations, users, mailboxes, SharePoint sites, Teams channels, Microsoft 365 Groups, and CRM data. Microsoft 365 Backup Storage adds rapid restore for the object types it protects.

On the Horizon: Microsoft 365 Backup Storage Integration

We will soon roll out our integration with Microsoft 365 Backup Storage. But this initial integration is just the start: As part of our overall initiative to deliver more intelligent guided data protection, we are leveraging the combined strengths of Microsoft’s and Arcserve’s respective platforms.

That puts Arcserve in a unique position to leverage critical customer intelligence to recommend backup configurations and intelligently provide “Guided Recovery” when needed. Here are some examples of added features that will be added to our integrated solution over time:

• Suggesting which data may benefit from rapid restore protection, using activity and cost data to balance recovery time, coverage, and cost intelligently.

• Knowing precisely where to quickly and completely retrieve the data when a user requests a restore.

• Seamlessly integrating restore across both storage platforms, allowing one-click restore of Entra ID and Microsoft 365 data.

• Automating data migration between platforms to provide cost-effective long-term data preservation, ensuring proper, cost-effective protection for different data types.

• Integrating auditing and management to help define, monitor, and enforce backup and compliance policies.

There’s plenty more to come, and we’ll share each advancement as it becomes available.

To dive into the details of Arcserve SaaS Backup, request a demo.

Ready to get started with a better SaaS backup solution today? Check out our 30-day free trial offer.