Immutability Support for your Microsoft 365 Backup
Backup immutability. It’s a phrase you may hear a lot. But what is immutability? According to the dictionary definition, it is this;
The characteristic of an object with a fixed structure and properties whose values cannot be changed.
For you, It may simply be a tick box you need to satisfy for cyber insurance policy or a line item on a Request For Proposal document. Regardless of the what or the why it is important to understand how immutability support is an important layer of your organizations’ overall data protection strategy.
Why do I need it?
In today’s ever-changing threat landscape, it is important to protect your backup data from unwanted deletion. This could be in the form of a malicious insider deleting backup data or a targeted cyberattack on backups themselves. Modern ransomware attacks often first seek out and destroy backups before moving onto encrypting production data. Having a backup copy that can not be deleted – an immutable backup – is a great tool to have in the arsenal to help avoid or recover from a loss of production data situation.
Now you are probably sitting there thinking, but this is Microsoft 365, not some file server I have to manage. This is Microsoft’s problem surely? Nope. Guess again. It is YOUR data, Microsoft simply provide the infrastructure to host the data.
But it is email data, that cannot be encrypted? Wrong again, email can be encrypted and deleted maliciously.
According to the Veeam Data Protection Trends report 2023, the leading cause of outages for 2020, 2021, and 2022 was a cyber incident. Most organizations are reporting on average two cyber incidents per year.
With a robust Microsoft 365 backup plan that includes immutability, you can minimise the risk of outages and total loss of data. As we said at the beginning, immutability is The characteristic of an object with a fixed structure and properties whose values cannot be changed. If you define an immutable backup to be held for 90 days, you better believe that the backup will exist for 90 days and nothing will change that.
The 11:11 Difference
With a true SaaS–based approach to backup from 11:11, we offer comprehensive onboarding services for your Microsoft 365 backup requirements, as well as seamless integration with the 11:11 Cloud Console, to allow for management and recovery of your data. Immutability is enforced on a secondary copy of your backup data, which is held separately to your primary backup. Backup data is encrypted by default and the approach of separating the backups into primary and secondary copies also offers the opportunity to define backup retention and immutability periods that meet your organization’s requirements. For example, you may require a three-year retention for your backups, but only 90 days of immutability. With this approach you can have both.
This can all easily be reviewed and confirmed within the 11:11 Cloud Console.
Our onboarding team will work with you to help define retention and immutability options during initial setup. Once your immutability and retention period has been set during onboarding, this can not be changed via the 11:11 Cloud Console, adding an additional layer of security and protection for your data.
Unlike other solutions on the market, 11:11 Cloud Backup for Microsoft 365 leverages object lock technology utilising AWS S3 Object storage. This means that the data has a time lock assigned to it and it cannot be changed whilst this time lock is active. Other solutions in the market only prohibit updates of the retention period from the management console, while the backup data behind it can still be deleted.
Conclusion
Now that we know what immutability is and how it applies to Microsoft 365 backup data, do you need it? No. Should you use it, absolutely! Think of it as an insurance policy with added benefits. Then let me ask you this. If your house burned to the ground and you had no insurance, could you rebuild your house? Maybe. But what if there were no bricks available to rebuild the house? Your backup is your insurance policy, the immutability piece is the guarantee you have the building blocks available to rebuild your house.
