Microsoft 365 Backup and Archive

Microsoft Inspire 2023 saw the announcement of two services that have been long awaited:

• Microsoft 365 Backup
• Microsoft 365 Archive

While 3rd-parties such as AvePoint, Veritas, Veeam, and SkyKick have offerings, many customers have wanted a native Microsoft product.

Microsoft 365 Backup

This provides protection and restore for:

• OneDrive
• SharePoint
• Exchange

and keeps all data within the Microsoft 365 security boundary. You will be able to:

• Backup all or select SharePoint sites, OneDrive accounts, and Exchange mailboxes in your tenant.
• Restore files, sites, and mailbox items in your tenant in parallel to a prior point-in-time in a granular manner or at massive scale.
• Search or filter content in your backups using key metadata such as item or site names, owners, or event types within specific restore point date ranges.

It will be accessed via the M365 Admin Center.

Microsoft 365 Archive

This will provide a cold storage tier within SharePoint for old/inactive data at a “cost effective price”. This will allow you to:

• Select and archive or reactivate full sites in place without needing to migrate your data outside of Microsoft. File level archiving will be coming in the second half of 2024.
• Maintain full admin-level search, eDiscovery, access policy, sensitivity label, DLP (Data Loss Prevention), retention policy, access control settings, and other security and compliance functionality.

Site-level archiving will be the only option at first until file-level archiving arrives mid-2024.

Overview

Sensibly, Microsoft have made APIs available for both services so partners (such as those mentioned above) can make use of this functionality too. Both of these new services are powered by Microsoft Syntex, a set of tools/products that is yet to truly find its place but is clearly becoming utilised more by Redmond.

You can see more info here and sign up for the previews of these products here.