For those who have followed my Articles, Social Posts, or general conversations, you will know that I am forever talking about backing up your data. So now we have great example to show why we keep going on about backing up your data. Here is a real case study involving one of our clients who has our Managed IT Service.
Easier to listen to our blog?
Brief Background
This client is a small business who has now migrated to Microsoft Office 365 for their email and data. They have Onedrive syncing all of their files and Sharepoint for a shared document storage. We manage everything for them. Everything is running smoothly.
The Problem
Microsoft have a very good quality of service. Their Service level agreement boasts a 99.97% uptime (percent of time, things are working). After some quick maths, we found that this was an average problem time of 8 minutes and 45 seconds within a month. You probably wouldnt notice that right?
So we received notification of a OneDrive issue. we noticed that access to all files were down. The problem was caused by Microsoft’s OneDrive and Sharepoint Service. It had disappeared completely from the cloud service and was no access to any of the data.
How we responded
Step 1. – We contacted the client and explained that we were aware of the issue, we picked up on it before most of the staff had even noticed there was a problem.
Step 2 – Recover the data from a seperate backup location – Just because your data is stored in the cloud, doesn’t mean that it is backed up. We copy all Microsoft Email, Files, Teams Data from Microsoft, in an event of an outage. Restored everything the client wanted so they could carry on straight away
Step 3 – Contact Microsoft on clients behalf, worked with them to get the service back up and running.
Step 4 – Once back up and running merge changes and check everything is working correctly.
Summery
In short, we were able to get ahead of the problem caused my a Cloud Service Provider and bring the customer back up and running in less time than 8 minutes and 45 seconds!
– We were notified automatically
– Majority of users hadn’t even noticed issue
– Client didnt have to wait on a busy service desk (as our clients don’t have to call us)
– Effectively implemented Disaster Recovery Plan in less than 10 minutes
– Resolved issue for happy client.
– Customer disruption was Minimal.
We see this as a very successful Disaster Recovery plan Implemented.
An important note about cloud hosting service (Microsoft 365 and Gsuite)
Both Microsoft 365 and Google GSuite have small print in their terms stating that they are not liable for the loss of data and recommend the account holder back it up to a third party. They are also not liable for human error, malicious attacks, or loss of data.
Dont believe me? – Here is the small print.
Our advise – Back it up!
Don’t ever rely on just one Cloud Service. always ensure you create a backup solution.
And then…
test that it works, regularly. The last thing you want is for it not to work when it is really needed!
Hopefully, you will take away something from the above. If you would like to stay up to date with the latest news and tips, please sign up to our mailing list below.