The topic of data protection for cloud services seems to surfacing a lot lately. I’ve had a debate with myself as to whether this is akin to when you buy a car, all of a sudden you notice just how many of your car are on the road OR as we’re approaching 2020 is everyone coming to the realization that even in the cloud you need to protect your assets and that not everything can be ephemeral.

The premise of the conversation is that with Cloud, you push off ownership of the infrastructure/platform. But what about the data? Who is responsible for making sure that it’s protected? It’s a good fundamental question that there is a lot of FUD around. But cutting straight to the chase, it’s your responsibility to ensure that your data is protected. AWS alludes to this with their shared security model, but other cloud providers bury this fact in their T’s & C’s. Gartner has a good whitepaper (behind paywall, so not linked here) laying out that YOU are responsible for YOUR data, so you can’t presume that your Cloud provider is protecting it for you

With this in mind, it seemed like an opportune time to look at how we’re protecting our Office 365 assets. What I’d like to cover today is a brief exploration of the Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365.

Getting up and Running

There’s little added value to an Organization running their own email infrastructure, so there has been an explosion in usage of Office 365 over the past few years. The fine folks over at Veeam have recognized this reality and recently released v4 of the Veeam Backup for Office 365 applications. New options provide additional flexibility to cost-effectively store data in Azure Blob storage, in addition to performance enhancements and encryption options.

After downloading the installer, the first thing you might notice is the size of downloads. THEY’RE tiny! When you’re going through the installation and this is the sum total of the options you have during installation, it makes sense as to why the packages are so small. About thirty seconds later you should have a pair of new applications available to you:

Veeam Backup for Office 365

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 PowerShell

Firing up the application for the first time you’ll get a notice about installing a license. I have to say that as a SMB customer, I really appreciate what Veeam has been doing with sharing community editions. When you’re running a small shop, you still need to be able to protect your environment, and having access to a fully functional enterprise class product is extremely valuable. All of the home-labbers out there should also take note. If you’re really trying to test the solution out though, you can get a free 30-day trial license for a fully featured test run of VBO. Before we move on to getting VBO configured, I’d like to point out that there is a PowerShell module available for VBO, so I’ll sprinkle a couple of those nuggets throughout this post… Like how to install a license using Install-VBOLicense:

Getting Ready for our first backup

First thing we need to do here, is add an organization that we’ll be backing up. The choices of Organizations we have available to us are: Microsoft Office 365, Hybrid and On-Premises. In this case I’m just going to be targeting a SharePoint instance that is fully in Office 365.

If you want to avoid the GUI you can also use the Add-VBOOrganization cmdlet.

Next you’ll have the opportunity to use the New-VBOOffice365ConnectionSettings cmdlet or the UI to configure your connection to the o365 instance. For the purposes of this blog, we’re just going to stick with Basic Authentication, but you should probably consider using Modern Authentication as MFA and the enhanced security it provides, is highly recommended. Regardless of which direction you go, please make sure to pay attention to the prerequisites guide and particularly the section on permissions.

Backup Time!

That’s what we’re here for right? It’s backup time!

We’ve got an Organization, so next we need a job. Click the button for “New Backup Job” or right-click your newly added organization and select the option to “Add to backup job…” After the name and description you have the option to choose what elements you’d like to backup on the “Select objects to back up” screen. You can get granular with users, groups, sites or organizations.

Again, to keep things simple we’re just going to tackle the entire organization. If you’d like, on the next screen you can choose objects to exclude from the backup. After selecting the backup proxy’s and the backup repository, you finally have the option to schedule your new awesome Office 365 backups.

That’s IT! Congratulations, in about 10 minutes you’ve managed to provide data protection to your Office 365 environment. I wish this post was longer, but the solution is simple and just works, so there you go! Easy backups of your cloud solution in a matter of minutes

I wish you all a peaceful and joyous holiday season.

PS. For my fellow PowerShell fans, the guide for these modules is quite nice.

PPS. We come to you with a late breaking update from my friend and fellow Vanguard Jim Jones! You can find a best practice guide for VBO at https://vbo.veeambp.com/. I’m not sure how I’ve missed this until now, but you can find a whole host of guides on how to configure your backups according to best practices.