The Nuances Of Microsoft Office 365 Data Protection

There’s no doubt that as organizations of all sizes make the shift to Microsoft Office 365 the business models of many Microsoft (MSFT) channel partners becomes increasingly challenged. With many implementations of Microsoft Office and Exchange disappearing into the cloud, solution providers need to figure out how to add additional value around Office 365.

One additional revenue opportunity that many solution providers might overlook is backup and recovery. After all, Microsoft Office 365 is a cloud service that Microsoft can easily back up on behalf of customers.

But Amanda LeVine, director of product marketing for Carbonite, notes that data protection issues in the age of the cloud are far more nuanced these days. Customers are increasingly becoming aware of the fact that they need to own their data regardless of where it happens to be stored. As such, via support for Microsoft Office 365 in the latest release of the Carbonite Server Backup service those customers have another place from which they can access their data. That’s important, said LeVine, because at any given time customers for one reason or another may need to access archived data that they don’t want to continue to pay Microsoft to store for them, or recover from an insider attack that results in large amounts of data stored in Microsoft Office 365 being maliciously deleted.

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Adding value around Microsoft Office 365 has become a lot easier for third-party vendors and their partners because the Microsoft Office 365 application programming interfaces (APIs) are now stable. As a result, in the course of the coming year solution providers should not be surprised to see the emergence of a fairly vibrant ecosystem of products and services that to one degree or another invoke Microsoft Office 365 APIs that are based on RESTful interfaces that are relatively simple to master. When all those product and services are combined with Microsoft Office 365, the ability to turn a profit around Microsoft offerings in the clouds becomes a lot more handsome.

Of course, the whole Microsoft Office 365 issue is about to come to a head as the end of life for Windows Server 2003 support deadline approaches on July 14th. There are somewhere north of 20 million instances of Windows Server 2003 still running and a larger percentage of them have Microsoft Exchange installed on them. The path of least resistance from an upgrade perspective for many of those customers is to simply upgrade to Microsoft Office 365.

Of course, the first step in making that transition is going to be backing up all that Windows Server 2003 data before any of it goes missing in the migration.