News

Microsoft 365 Backup and Archive Services Unveiled

• By Kurt Mackie
• July 21, 2023

Microsoft described a new Microsoft 365 Backup product and a new Microsoft 365 Archive product this week during its Inspire event for partners.

Microsoft 365 Backup provides backup and recovery services for tenancy data associated with the use of "OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange" services. It lets organizations search and filter content for backups using metadata. Organizations can back up some or all files, and they can restore "files, sites, and mailbox items" massively or granularly. When it's commercially offered, Microsoft 365 Backup will have a "restore service level agreement (SLA)."

Microsoft 365 Archive can help organizations address inactive data needing "cold storage," perhaps for compliance reasons. Organizations get search and discovery capabilities. They can set data retention policies, along with "site lifecycle control capabilities." They can also set data security and compliance measures, such as "access policy, sensitivity label [and] DLP (Data Loss Prevention)." Organizations can "archive or reactivate full sites in place without needing to migrate your data outside of Microsoft." Right now, Microsoft 365 Archive just does site-level archiving. Microsoft expects to add file-level archiving "in the second half of 2024."

The two new services aren't yet available. Microsoft expects to release public previews of them in "Q4 of this year." Meanwhile, Microsoft has established Microsoft 365 Backup public preview and Microsoft 365 Archive public preview signup pages, where users can fill out a form and apply to try the previews.

Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive also provide APIs to work with partner solutions. Organizations may want to use partner solutions with Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive when backing up and archiving data associated with both Microsoft and non-Microsoft applications and services.

"With Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive APIs, our partners can uniquely provide a single and seamless experience that protects your data estate, whether inside or outside of Microsoft 365, in combination with our speed and storage innovations," explained Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative apps and platforms, in the announcement.

Early Microsoft 365 Backup partners include "AvePoint, Barracuda, CommVault, Rubrik, Veeam and Veritas." Both Rubrik and Veeam described how their solutions integrate with Microsoft 365 Backup in this Redmondmag.com article.

Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive are based on Microsoft Syntex, and are listed at the Syntex product page. Microsoft Syntex (formerly known as "SharePoint Syntex") uses artificial intelligence to process files and extract information. It's used to automate business processes after an initial machine teaching phase.