Document summary
This document provides information relating to the services provided for customers that use our M365 & Google Workspace Backup solution. This information is designed to provide clarity on the scope of the items included within the overall service provision.
Scope and delivery of the service
Microsoft and Google operate their cloud services under a shared responsibility model. This means that while Microsoft and Google are responsible for maintaining the availability and resilience of their infrastructure, the organisation remains responsible for protecting its own data and ensuring appropriate controls are in place to meet data protection, business continuity, compliance, and security requirements.
Crucially, data within Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace is not automatically backed up in a way that protects against accidental deletion, malicious activity, retention gaps, or long-term data loss. Native retention features are not a substitute for a true independent backup.
Our service uses a secure, enterprise-grade third-party backup solution to protect both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace data within a fully isolated platform. This separation significantly reduces risk by ensuring your backup data is independent of the production environment.
The platform securely backs up:
Exchange Online mailboxes / Gmail
OneDrive / Google Drive
SharePoint / Shared Drives
Microsoft Teams / Google Groups (where applicable)
Contacts and calendars
All user mailboxes and associated data are automatically included, along with any new users added to your Microsoft 365 tenant or Google Workspace domain. Backups are continuously monitored by our team, with proactive remediation actions taken where required.
This provides enhanced resilience, improved compliance posture, and peace of mind that your organisation’s cloud data is protected beyond the standard provider safeguards.
Supported platforms and content backup
Our Cloud backup platform supports the Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace suites, namely:
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Email = Exchange Online (email), including calendars / Google Mail
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Data = OneDrive / Google Drive
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Shared Data = SharePoint / Shared Drives
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Messaging/Collaboration = Teams / Google Groups
Frequency of backup
Data is backed up 3 times a day automatically.
Backup monitoring
Our Network Operations Centre (NOC) team conduct monitoring of the backup platform during weekdays, identifying any failed jobs and investigating these, aiming to ensure that the next pass of the backup is successful. Whereby an issue persists, this is escalated to our vendor to assist with further investigation.
If multiple backups fail subsequently, our team will contact the customer to provide updates whilst this is investigated.
Service desk support
Customers can raise queries directly with our dedicated support team for prompt assistance. Typical requests include
the restoration of folders, files, emails or SharePoint based data.
The service coverage is provided in-line with the customer's existing Managed IT Service support contract.
Backup storage and encryption
Data is protected using AES-256 encryption and the backups are immutable; this ensures that the data cannot be modified or deleted in any way.
Portability of backups / transition to a new supplier
The data cannot be exported from the Datto SaaS protection platform for ingestion into another system, as such if a customer is transitioning to another supplier; the backups will either need to be retained with Armstrong Bell until they are no longer required or alternatively the customer can simply start a new schedule with a new platform.
Data restoration options
Our solution provide several options should you need to restore data that has been backed up:
- Restore data directly to the mailbox or area that it originally was stored within
- Restore data into another Microsoft 365 user account
- Export data in to standard file formats as required
Alert management
Our team receive alerts for a variety of events relating to the platform, these include the following:
- Planned maintenance
- Degraded service due to issues arising
- Critical incidents or major outages
When one of these is received by our team, it is initially reviewed for impact and then if appropriate communications will be sent to customers.
Vendor escalation
Our team work closely with our preferred partner for cloud backup services, with the ability to escalate incidents to them where required. All initial analysis and investigation is conducted internally and then specific platform or technical queries will be logged with the vendor; there is no additional cost to the customer for this and our team will fully manage this process throughout.
Addition of new features
Whereby a new feature is introduced to the platform that would be of benefit to a customer, the required changes are reviewed by our team to ensure they are suitable for implementation. If the change has any requirement for disruption to service or an adjustment to core components that may alter existing functionality, these will be communicated to the customer and a route forward agreed.
For any additional functionality that requires considerable work and/or integration, these items will be scoped and discussed independently with the customer.
On-boarding
The on-boarding steps for the core components are listed below:
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Initial tenant configuration
- Create customer within backup platform
- Configure secure API integration in to customer Microsoft 365 / Google Workspace tenant
- Verify secure connectivity is in place
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Implement backup policy
- Configure user and shared mailbox backup parameters
- Implement 3 times a day backup policy
- Deploy policy for 1 year retention
- Configure alerting to service desk
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Testing phase
- Conduct a test backup to verify data capture
- Perform test restore to confirm data validity
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Go-live
- Monitor first backup run and verify success
- Troubleshoot any issues that arise