It’s not really hard to see why that setup became redundant: that trusty piece of hardware, with its installed copy of email handling software like Microsoft Exchange or Kerio, was doomed to fail eventually, whether it be from an office disaster or the finite lifespan of hardware.
Then cloud-based services came along and ensured your email was suddenly resilient to real-world dangers. A cloud backup for your Exchange Onsite was dependable, and if backing up into the cloud wasn’t enough, why not just move there entirely? No service has exemplified this virtual shift more than Microsoft Office 365 – placing your entire Exchange (and operating your inbox client too if your prefer) off-site in the cloud, and letting Microsoft worry about the data centre infrastructure, has frequently been the smart choice for both IT strategy and budgets.
For many, the cloud was backup enough, but in larger organisations or those with special regulatory demands on email retention or availability, users are increasingly wary of certain dangers from a wholesale move to the cloud.
Because internet outages aside, the offline copy you have control over is only as reliable as the client laptop of smartphone it’s stored on, and client devices are frequently even more at risk than your old server. Break your device on the same day as your office loses connectivity for any reason, and your email history is suddenly hundreds of miles away.
Enter Veeam’s newest backup product: Veeam Backup for Office 365 – which turns the concept of a hybrid backup upside down to provide something new, in the form of a local backup for Exchange Online.
Backup for Office 365 replicates a backup of your Microsoft cloud-based email and calendars to a server of your choice (a physical piece of hardware if you wish) on specific backup terms. Users can continue operating Office 365’s wonderfully tactile email service from the cloud, knowing that Veeam will provide you an up-to-date local copy your IT team can immediately seize in event of an emergency.
The actual server architecture holding the backup can be physical or virtual (which potentially makes the entire notion of ‘localised’ hybrid backup a bit abstract, but bear with us) so Veeam’s solution is adaptable in the extreme – re-saving your emails wherever you prefer, to any machine with a Microsoft operating system.
The curious thing is that this hybrid inversion actually makes a lot of practical sense, and re-introduces a critical fail-safe role for a traditional ‘on-hand’ server. Veeam’s mission statement, to always provide ‘availability for the always-on enterprise‘ (a focus on constant, utterly uncompromising uptime of IT services and data for businesses that can’t afford any downtime) is demonstrated with a technical obsession to fulfill even the most demanding business continuity planning.
For business continuity and IT contingency planning, contact Lineal today about Veeam Backup for Office 365