Securing Remote Data for Microsoft Teams in Office 365

A recent Microsoft work trend index report revealed a daily record of 2.7 billion meetings in a single day - a testament to the company’s swift response to the rapid shift in global workforce culture.

Microsoft Teams (MS Teams) in Office 365 (O365) helps optimize internal communicative and collaborative efforts within your organization. Successful MS Teams usage is data-governed, hence it requires holistic data loss prevention (DLP) efforts.

Data Deletion & Recovery

Within the O365 ecosystem, there exists two types of data deletion - soft and hard.

Soft deletions (emails, contacts, tasks), automatically travel to the “Deletions” folder where the data retention period lasts between 14 and 30 days (during which items are fully recoverable). However, if an item is tagged to be purged from the “Deletions” folder, it is hard-deletable and unrecoverable; thus only retrievable through an installed backup system.

Customer data can be actively or passively deleted.

An active deletion occurs when a tenant has an active subscription, so either a user or administrator deletes the data or an administrator deletes a user. Passive deletion occurs when the tenant subscription has ended. Learn about data deletion and destruction in O365, and how to recover deleted files in MS Teams.

Data Retention Policy

Retention policies are the primary defense against loss of data in MS Teams.

A data retention period is typically governed by suitable policies. A policy is applicable to a full environment, as well as specific data locations or particular users. Policies can also be specific to keyword type and content sensitivity.

Whether data is intentionally or accidentally deleted, if labeled accordingly, it will travel to and remain in a secure location until the end of the retention period. Read about how data retention policies work in MS Teams.

Data Backup Storage & Protection

When protecting data in MS Teams, it is best to backup in a quickly recoverable manner.

Ideally, you maintain short-term backups and long-term archives to enable granular and point-in-time recovery (PITR). Perform regular recovery tests to ensure the validity and availability of your backups. Data recovery speed depends on several factors, including backup location, available WAN bandwidth, and data quantity.

The recovery time of on-site backups tends to be rapid; whereas that of off-site (cloud-enabled) backups depends on internet bandwidth. Bandwidth speed determines data transfer speed, which is critical in off-site data backup.

It is best to maintain two or more copies of your workloads, both on-site and off-site.

1. On-site (on-premises) O365backup enables high-speed data and backup access. When running backup or recovery jobs, accelerate the process by optionalizing data transferability over a wide area network (WAN).
2. Off-site (cloud-enabled) O365 backup is cost-efficient, and scales storage opportunities as data quantity increases. Trusted Tech Team offers Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 to meet this end.