Companies are turning to the cloud to enable employees to collaborate more effectively, be more productive and work from any device. Microsoft Office 365 facilitates the modern working environment and helps reduce infrastructure and IT service costs. At the same time, it is important for organisations adopting Office 365 to understand the need to add a third-party backup solution to protect their organisation's data. Here are 5 reasons why third-party backup is essential for all Microsoft Cloud data, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams and OneDrive. 1. Microsoft hosts your data but does not protect it from human error. Microsoft Office 365 is an excellent platform that makes it easy for your colleagues to share and co-edit the same document in SharePoint Online, Teams, and OneDrive. Unfortunately, the collaborative environment also makes it easy to accidentally delete, modify, or move files. In fact, human error is the leading cause of all data loss incidents. Microsoft is contractually committed to not viewing, modifying, or accessing your data. Therefore, they have no way of knowing whether the modification or deletion was intentional or not. 2. Microsoft offers a short retention period, not a backup service. This means you cannot always recover your data. While Office 365 has methods for retaining deleted files, emails, or mailboxes, data can only be retained temporarily, depending on the policies applied to the data. Furthermore, the data is not easily recoverable. Once the retention period expires (usually 30 days), you may not be able to restore this deleted data. Therefore, third-party backup and recovery capabilities are the only way for your organisation to ensure that it is fully protected against data loss. 3. Hackers are present outside and sometimes even inside your organisation. When your business places its valuable data in the cloud, it must take additional steps to protect that data from malicious users who may maliciously alter, encrypt, or delete strategic data. With third-party backup and recovery, businesses can rest assured that data lost due to hacktivism or disgruntled employees will not be lost forever. 4. Auditors are vigilant about the cloud. Your auditors want to verify that your company complies with both IT governance and regulatory requirements, whether the data is in the cloud or on-premises. Therefore, it is important for companies of all sizes to exercise due diligence to ensure that your cloud-hosted data meets your compliance requirements. Users should only have access to the minimum resources they need (the ‘least privilege’ principle), and access to sensitive data should be restricted. You need to create a governance model that aligns access to applications and data with business needs. This is where identity and data access governance tools can help prevent users from gaining inappropriate access and automate user access review and monitoring processes. 5. A requirement: rapid restoration of lost data. In today's collaborative cloud, it is not enough to recover lost data. Your organisation must be able to quickly restore that data from a specific point in time. With the ability to roll back, businesses can avoid wasting time recreating unnecessary data. Let our team of IT infrastructure and data protection experts help you take the first steps towards complying with the data protection requirements applicable to your organisation. We have long-standing expertise, methodologies and practical tools at our disposal.

Malicious hackers are attacking more and more frequently and threatening all types of businesses, especially cities, hospitals, and schools. According to Malwarebytes, ransomware detection increased by 363% over the past year. No more access to private data, emails, phones, management systems, delivery systems, payment systems, etc. This ransomware takes companies' IT systems hostage and only releases them once a ransom has been paid. In an interview with the New York Times in August, Eli Sugarman, who heads the Hewlett Foundation's cybersecurity programme, said: ‘We're seeing more ransomware attacks because they work.’ Swiss organisations under attack Switzerland is not immune to the growing threat of ransomware. Proof of this is that the Swiss Federal Office for Information Security (MELANI), the Swiss government agency active in the field of cybersecurity, has already warned companies twice this year following waves of cyber attacks. The costs of these attacks should not be underestimated. For example, Meier Tobler, a Swiss listed company, suffered a total shutdown for four days in July. As a result, it incurred an estimated loss of turnover of CHF 5 million, as well as exceptional costs of CHF 1 to 2 million related to combating the attack, which affected its annual results. According to a global study conducted by Sophos in 2018, the average cost of an attack was CHF 130,000. Cyber insurance To address this new type of risk, more and more insurance policies are being offered against cyber attacks. However, insurers offer various types of cover with different approaches: their products are well designed, but exclusions set out in the General Terms and Conditions of Insurance (GTC) could be invoked when a claim is made. Some insurers are willing to offer favourable rates and waive some of these exclusions if guarantees can be provided regarding security measures, updates, maintenance and password usage practices. Let our team of IT infrastructure and data protection experts help you take immediate steps to secure your data. We have long-standing expertise and apply best practices to ensure the security of your data and that of your organisation, both on-site and in the cloud. We can check whether you comply with your insurer's data security requirements. Please do not hesitate to contact us. 

Your organisation may need you to implement strict controls on how Teams are named and classified, on the ability to add guests as team members, and on who can create teams. Here are the top 9 questions to ask yourself about how to manage Microsoft Teams for your organisaDoes your organisation need a specific naming convention for teams? Should team creators be able to assign organisation-specific classifications to teams? Should you restrict the ability to add guests to teams on an individual basis? Should your organisation limit the number of people who can create teams? Does your organisation require teams to have an expiry date? Does your organisation require specific data retention policies to be applied to teams? Does your organisation plan to require the ability to archive inactive teams to preserve read-only content? Does your organisation require limiting team functionality across your tenant? Does your organisation require Teams features to be restricted to certain users? We can help you determine your team management and governance needs to keep your data secure.  Let our team of IT infrastructure and data protection experts help you take the first steps towards complying with the data protection requirements that apply to your organisation. We have long-standing expertise, methodologies and practical tools to provide a simple and effective solution for your cloud computing and on-site backup needs. We can verify whether you are compliant with your insurer's data security requirements. Please do not hesitate to contact us.