Microsoft Office 365 is one of the leading business productivity suites in the world right now. If we talk about current statistics, almost 40% of businesses are either using Office 365 or planning to move to it. After having a look at the current scenario, we can say that Office 365 will keep growing. It might be possible that your organization is also planning to switch to Office 365 or is already using it. Microsoft offers various plans according to the organization’s requirements that contain different series of applications. However, there is one common application for email communication i.e. OWA – Outlook Web Access.
Email messages are one of the most convenient ways to get in touch with all the employees in the organization. So, the importance of emails does not need any further explanation. Now, the next question that comes to the user’s mind is how secure is Microsoft Outlook email? This might sound odd to some users as O365 is a cloud-based suite. But online threats have increased a lot nowadays and even cloud storage is not safe.
We will recommend to the users that the O365 email cloud is not 100% free of security risks. There can be a data loss situation, and everyone should accept it. To know more, go through the following section to find out why users want to know how secure Office 365 mail is and why we cannot claim it to be completely secure.
1. Internal Threats – Any employee can turn hostile anytime and it can result in intentional deletion of crucial business emails. In the current data retention policy offered by Microsoft, there is no special protection policy for intentional deletion. It is considered a normal deletion as done in case of any other deletion. Thus, if intentionally deleted crucial emails are not recovered before the default retention time frame, an organization might lose crucial data permanently.
2. External Threats – According to a recent survey, almost 90% of online attacks are targeted via emails. And this can happen on various cloud-based email clients like Office 365 as well. Additionally, all these ransomware attacks also happened on O365 accounts. So, you just cannot think that your crucial email data on the cloud is safe and secure. Therefore, all these factors make users think that is Office 365 mail secure or not.
3. Accidental Loss – Other than these two threats, another possible reason can be accidental loss of data. This can happen while deleting hundreds of unnecessary emails from your account and accidentally deleting important emails as well. Moreover, if you are lucky enough and notice those deleted emails before they exceed the data retention limit of Office 365, then you can recover them from the Deleted Items folder. Otherwise, those accidentally deleted emails will be lost forever.
4. Data Privacy – Office 365 keeps data on the cloud, which is not liked by many users since they are worried that their data might get leaked or someone might read their confidential information. Plus, with the O365 Home plan, there is a huge risk of a data breach because there is no security provided by Microsoft for that.
Read also: How Long Does Office 365 Keep Deleted Emails?
Microsoft provides various security measures to protect cloud data from cyber threats or unauthorized access. With their help, one can easily understand how secure is Microsoft Office email. Remember, Microsoft provides robust security according to its subscription plan like the Business Premium plan with the highest security & Home Plan with no protection. To understand that in more detail, let’s have a quick look at the types of restrictions offered by the same:
Keep in mind: These securities are available according to your Office 365 Business plan that you own.
If your organization is planning to move to O365 or is currently using it, so you should opt for it or stay there only. Instead of opting out, users must find solutions to secure their crucial cloud data. Like any other cloud-based email service, having a backup of Office 365 data is the best way to ensure data security. Having data backup at regular intervals can be extremely useful for organizations in case of data loss.
Once you have an idea of how important it is for the organizations/users to have Office 365 backup, you might be thinking the ways to do the same. Thus, here we learn a backup solution for Office 365 mailbox to PST format. This application is capable enough to backup the user mailbox as well as the shared mailbox.
Using this tool, users can store a backup copy of their crucial data on their local system or external storage. Moreover, users can also save O365 contacts, calendars, and tasks as well along with email data. Another important feature of this tool is that it offers category-based and date-based filters as well to backup only important data.
Although Office 365 suite is the class-leading email service offered by Microsoft, even it is not 100% free from cyber-attacks. Additionally, intentional or accidental deletion can also be a serious issue for organizations. Thus, users who have queries like how secure is Microsoft Outlook email will get their solution here. The described backup tool can help them to save their data into some storage device for emergency purposes, ensuring data continuity.