7 Critical Office 365 Disaster Recovery Plan Mistakes Businesses Make

Alexis Daniel

April 13, 2022

All Post

Data is the primary asset for every organization and a data loss can become very costly for respected enterprises. The lost data may include customer, employee, or even stakeholder information. Intruder attacks, hardware failures, and system hacking have become some common issues in the current world.

If you don’t have a proper disaster recovery plan, you can be subject to huge hacker ransom demands. If you are using Office 365 in your organization on a regular basis, then the Office 365 disaster recovery plan becomes very important for your firm. You must be careful while planning the Office 365 disaster recovery plan for your organization and should not make seven common mistakes.

Office 365 Disaster Recovery Plan Mistakes

1.Forgetting to Set Up Litigation Hold/Retention Policy

You must be clear about the priority of your data. It will help you to choose the data that you need to back up on a daily or weekly basis. Microsoft already provides you with a data policy that keeps your data stored with them for some time after deletion. After the files are deleted permanently, they are completely removed from the system.

If you have not created a disaster recovery plan (DRP) and applied it consistently and thoroughly, you may face severe problems. It can result in a loss of priority data and affect your Office 365 disaster recovery plan policy compliance. A better DRP will help your business to recover your prioritized data at times of disaster.

2. Confusing Microsoft 365 Data Backup with Office 365 Data Preservation Tools

Sometimes businesses misinterpret the eDiscovery and Preservation hold library as the office 365 preservation tools. It only stores data on a temporary basis. E-discovery helps you to locate, aggregate, and report on relevant data, and leverages the robust SharePoint search system. It lets you take backup of the Office 365 data e-mails, team chats,SharePoint, and OneDrive files.   Note some user data is only retained as long as a user is active in a system such as OneDrive and Exchange, and based on Retention policies, the data is disposed of overtime.

Once the user is deleted from the system, relevant data may be automatically discarded and access and restoration may no longer be possible.

3. The Plan is Outdated

Your Office 365 disaster recovery plan and retention and disposition policies need to be updated periodically to stay in line with compliance policies and stay one step ahead of threats. Similarly, new files might need to be backed up for protection against future threats.  Similarly, the document holds need to be managed to keep in compliance.

4. There’s No Communication

The communication between the recovery team and stakeholders plays a vital role in the Office 365 disaster recovery plan. There should be clear communication between the management and the DRP team to avoid any confusion in the recovery procedure.

Alternate communication channels should be available for the teams to communicate if the primary channels are not available for communication. It should be clear whom the team members have to contact to inform about the updates in the recovery procedure. Better communication ensures the speedy recovery of lost data through DPA.

5. Relying on Single and/or Infrequent Backups

Backup is the most vital part of a successful Office 365 disaster recovery plan. You should take frequent backups as new data keeps added to the organization’s database.  There are third-party backup tools that can greatly improve backups and more importantly, the ability to restore content.  Your backup must contain the data stored consistently across all systems to avoid data loss. Infrequent backups are equivalent to no backups at all as the desired recovery will be inconsistent at best.

6. Not Preparing Remote Access

If your organization faces a disaster, then the work of the whole enterprise can come to a halt. You need to be pre-planning for the organization’s work to continue at the same pace during a disaster. Remote business planning should be your priority factor in Office 365 disaster recovery plan.  Covid has accelerated organizations awareness and led to a focus and boost in their capabilities, but it is an area for planning and remote access testing.

A disaster may affect the hardware, applications, and communication channels of an organization. If the business is not pre-planning to overcome these, it can face a serious operational and even financial crisis.

If the hardware of computers is unavailable or even destroyed, then the employees need to work from the remote computers. The best option for remote access is to work from personal computers and company laptops. The task of remote access becomes easier if data of employees’ computers are considered under backup.  The best is to retain all data and documents in company-controlled systems and environments.  Alternate channels must be created for the employees to communicate as the communication channels can be deeply affected by a disaster. You should consider the use of SaaS or cloud-based applications to remotely use the applications from other computers.

7. Not learning from experience

It might happen that your DRP plan will not be perfect at the first trial. The recovery plan may not be able to recover some particular kind of data or reduce the damage of the disaster. But once the disaster is over, we need to learn from the experience and find out and correct the shortcomings in your data recovery plan. You should identify the areas of concern in your plan and find solutions to the problems so they do not recur in the future.

Additional Read

MS-Office Integration with SharePoint

Conclusion

Data recovery plans are the primary requirement for a company to avoid data loss during an intruder attack or system hacking. If your organization works primarily on Office 365 then you should include Office 365 disaster recovery plans in your periodic tasks.

You must prepare a complete data recovery plan (DRP) to secure your open office data from being lost in an unforeseen disaster. You should have a policy and systems for frequent backups from a range of sources and maintain alternate communication and remote access facilities to avoid future problems in DRP. The Reality Tech team can help plan to avoid a disaster becoming a true disaster for your enterprise.