Let’s start by clarifying what we mean when we talk about Microsoft 365, or M365 for short. In this context, we’re talking about Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint Online, and Teams.

 

These cloud-based services have largely replaced their similar on-premises predecessors: Exchange, file servers, SharePoint, and Skype for Business. Traditionally, these would have been managed, maintained, and backed up by your internal IT team.

 

When Microsoft 365 (then called Office 365) launched, many organisations saw it as a no-brainer to migrate. It promised always-on availability and, more importantly, offloaded much of the infrastructure headache to Microsoft.

 

But here’s the catch…

 

According to Microsoft’s Shared Responsibility Model, Microsoft handles the maintenance of the infrastructure — the hardware and the underlying platform — keeping the lights on, so to speak. However, you, the customer, are still responsible for your data: ensuring its integrity, retention, accessibility, and compliance with legal or regulatory requirements.

 

And this is where many organisations have been caught off guard. They assumed Microsoft was backing up their data the same way their on-prem IT team used to — only to find out (too late) that data protection is still their responsibility.

 

Accidental deletions, overwrites, or corruption can still happen. And that’s without even factoring in the increasing threat of cyber-attacks like ransomware.  Given how integral M365 services are to modern organisations, ensuring robust data protection is essential; safeguarding continuity, resilience, and long-term success

 

That’s why reliable, independent backup has become more important than ever.

 

The Rise of Third-Party Solutions

 

Recognising this gap, third-party vendors stepped in to offer true backup solutions for M365. One of the earliest and most popular was Veeam, which released Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 back in late 2016.

 

Veeam had already built a strong reputation for feature-rich, granular backups for on-prem environments. With tools like Veeam Explorers, customers gained advanced restore options. For example, recovering a single email, folder, or document, rather than having to roll back entire data sets.

 

But Wait — Doesn’t Microsoft Now Offer Backups?

 

Yes, Microsoft recently introduced its own Microsoft 365 Backup solution. While this is a step in the right direction and may suit some organisations, it still lags behind third-party tools in several key areas.

 

At the time of writing, Microsoft’s native backup offering falls short in a few areas:

 

  • Granular restore for OneDrive and SharePoint is limited, but improvements are planned.
  • Exchange Online supports mailbox-level recovery, not individual email restores via Microsoft Backup.
  • Teams backup is still incomplete — only files stored in SharePoint (Teams Channels) are backed up; chats, messages, and metadata are not yet covered.
  • True long-term retention options, currently topping out at a year and more frequent restore points only available for two weeks.
  • Support for restoring outside the Microsoft ecosystem.

 

Microsoft’s tool is better described as a snapshot-based backup (or checkpoint for the Hyper-V fans). This is great for disaster recovery scenarios, like a ransomware attack, but less helpful for day-to-day data recovery (e.g., a single user deleting their OneDrive folder).Plus, the backups themselves still reside within the Azure platform, Meaning you’re still reliant on Microsoft infrastructure.  And, as any good backup administrator knows: “If you can’t restore it, it’s not a backup.”

 

Why 3rd-Party Solutions Still Matter

 

Veeam and similar vendors offer:

 

  • Data stored outside of Microsoft’s ecosystem.
  • Long-term retention with flexible policies
  • Immutability to prevent tampering, ie. no one can secretly alter or erase data
  • Data portability, including the ability to restore to a different tenant, or even back on-premises.

 

However, the trade-off is that these solutions typically require infrastructure management. You need to maintain storage, compute, updates, and backup jobs. For some businesses, this can be an operational headache.

 

Enter Telefónica Tech’s M365 BaaS Solution

 

This is exactly where Telefónica Tech can help.

 

With our Microsoft 365 Backup-as-a-Service (M365BaaS) offering, we remove the complexity. Our skilled teams manage the full backup stack.  So, from the physical infrastructure to the Veeam software, ensuring your backups are consistent, secure, and recoverable.

 

Even better, our Self-Service Restore portal provides a SaaS-like experience, allowing your users or admins to easily search, browse, and recover items without raising a ticket.

 

And because it’s priced on a simple per-user, consumption-based model, your costs scale with your business.

 

Ready to simplify your Microsoft 365 backups? Get in touch with one of our expert sales reps today and discover how Telefónica Tech can protect your data, the smart way.

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