I'm trying to decide how to protect our Microsoft 365 data, including Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams. Is Microsoft 365 Backup sufficient to manage internally, or would it be better to pay an MSP or third-party SaaS provider to handle it? I'm mainly weighing cost, restore capabilities, security, testing, and how much ongoing administration is involved. What approach has worked well for other organizations?
4 Answers
The biggest issue isn’t just choosing a product—it’s whether the backups are isolated, monitored, and regularly tested. Make sure a compromised Microsoft 365 administrator account can’t delete the backup data, and confirm that the service can restore individual items as well as whole sites or mailboxes. If you use an MSP, ask for monthly verification reports and periodic full restore tests. An untested backup is basically just wishful thinking.
For a small organization with the right technical skills, self-managed solutions can be much cheaper. A NAS-based setup can back up Microsoft 365 data, replicate it to a second device, and optionally copy it to object storage. That gives you more control and may support user self-service restores. The tradeoff is that you own the hardware, monitoring, updates, capacity planning, and recovery testing. It isn’t truly set-and-forget.
A self-managed setup is workable, but I’d avoid keeping the only backup in the same environment or under the same administrator credentials as the production tenant. Have at least one separate or off-site copy.
Microsoft 365 Backup can be a valid option, but it isn’t automatically the best fit for every company. You still need someone to configure retention, permissions, monitoring, and recovery procedures. A separate SaaS platform such as Veeam, AvePoint, Dropsuite, or another established provider can make this easier and may include storage and support. You don’t necessarily need a full MSP just to purchase a backup service if you have the expertise to manage it internally.
The important distinction is that a cloud backup isn’t inherently invalid. The real questions are whether it protects against accidental deletion, ransomware, administrative compromise, and configuration loss, and whether restores have actually been tested.
If your MSP already manages your other backups and offers a reasonable per-user price with storage and licensing included, having them handle Microsoft 365 is often the simplest choice. You’re paying for setup, monitoring, troubleshooting, and someone accountable for testing restores. Just get the recovery objectives, retention terms, ownership of the backup data, and an exit or migration plan documented before signing.
That can be close to the cost of buying licenses and storage yourself, while avoiding the day-to-day administration. I’d also ask to see evidence that they successfully restore data rather than relying only on job-success notifications.
Exactly. Ask how they handle retention, tenant-wide recovery, and what happens if your relationship with the MSP ends. Those details matter just as much as the monthly price.