Microsoft 365 disaster recovery protects emails, documents, applications, and configurations in case of disruption. While Microsoft offers built-in availability and recovery features, third-party platforms add advanced safeguards. This guide helps you create a comprehensive plan that secures not only your data, but also the configurations and policies responsible for managing Microsoft 365.
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Disaster recovery (DR) is a set of policies, procedures, and tools aimed at restoring and maintaining business continuity in the event of a natural or man-made disaster.
DR involves planning, preparing, and implementing measures to minimize the impact of such events on the organization's essential functions and services. It plays a crucial role in ensuring the availability, integrity, and security of IT systems and data, minimizing downtime, and preventing data loss.
A specific Microsoft 365 disaster recovery plan refers to the strategies and solutions put in place to protect an organization's Microsoft 365 data and services, such as emails, documents, and applications, in the event of a disaster.
Microsoft 365 has built-in features that help maintain service availability, protect data, and facilitate recovery as needed. However, a number of third-party M365 backup and recovery platforms with advanced features also exist that can help create more comprehensive fail safes for M365.
Let's talk about everything you need to know to create a comprehensive disaster recovery plan for Microsoft 365. This guide will provide M365 disaster recovery plan examples and help you develop a plan that secures not only your data, but also the configurations and policies responsible for managing Microsoft 365.
Microsoft 365 disaster recovery planning is about more than just data replication. An end-to-end disaster recovery plan requires understanding your complete M365 environment and identifying everything that needs to be backed up as well as what your parameters and objectives for disaster recovery are.
A good recovery plan also acknowledges that incident response will require evidence, so putting the right processes and tools in place will enable a business to look back and see what happened.
Here are the critical steps to get started on developing or refining your Microsoft 365 disaster recovery plan:
Start by clearly articulating what disaster recovery means for your organization. This definition should cover both large-scale incidents like data breaches or ransomware attacks and smaller disruptions, such as accidental deletions or configuration errors. By establishing scope and objectives up front, you’ll set a clear foundation for the rest of the plan.
It’s critical to assess potential risks that could impact Microsoft 365 operations, including external threats, system outages, and user errors. Conducting a risk assessment helps you understand your environment’s vulnerabilities, prioritize remediation efforts, and proactively plan for a wide range of scenarios.
A part of this risk assessment and management process is preparing for audits and compliance. CoreView’s Chief Revenue Officer, Mark Cravotta, explained, “It's very important that a company can demonstrate that it has a plan for business continuity. That it has tested the business continuity plan at least annually and is in compliance. This includes backing up critical data, as well as Microsoft tenant configurations, which are essential components of the critical infrastructure requirements. Many companies are unaware that their Microsoft tenant isn’t automatically backed up by Microsoft or their data backup provider. It is a matter of time before compliance auditors require proof of a tenant backup from all organizations to satisfy key business continuity requirements.”
Not all data and services are equally vital to business operations. Inventory all assets within your M365 environment, including documents, mailboxes, SharePoint sites, Teams configurations, and workflows, and then rank them based on business impact to ensure your recovery strategy focuses on the most mission-critical resources.
It’s key at this stage to think about the fallout of a disaster not only from the perspective of your data being held hostage, and you being able to resume business as usual. CRO Mark Cravotta highlighted other considerations, “Monitoring tenant configuration drift on a real-time basis can immediately identify a threat actor performing nefarious tasks in your tenant. If the tenant were to be compromised, there is a significant risk of data exfiltration and compromise of personal information. This has a tremendous impact on reputational risk and also has monetary consequences under many privacy frameworks.”
Your recovery strategy should detail how you’ll restore operations after a disaster. This includes specifying the tools, procedures, personnel, and third-party solutions involved in recovering lost or compromised data, configurations, and services. Tailor your approach for various disaster types and align with your organization’s risk tolerance.
Establish concrete Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for each critical component. RTO defines how quickly you must recover a service to prevent operational losses, while RPO identifies the acceptable age of data restored after an incident. These objectives guide your backup and recovery frequency.
Consistently scheduled backups of business data, such as emails, files, and documents, are fundamental to any disaster recovery plan. Use both native and third-party solutions to automate backups and ensure they’re stored securely, easily accessible, and protected against accidental overwrite or deletion.
Microsoft 365 features thousands of potential configurations spread across hundreds of different screens, portals, and dashboards, making it impossible to keep a manual record of your system configurations. So, when your tenant is compromised due to an external attack or internal error, having a backup of those configuration files along with your business data is crucial to ensuring continuity of your cloud infrastructure.
Many organizations falsely believe that Microsoft offers native backup capabilities for their configurations – and this is patently untrue. Microsoft – like most cloud service providers – operate with a shared responsibility model, meaning that while they are responsible for the security of the cloud infrastructure, they are not responsible for the underlying configurations and data in the cloud. And while almost 100% of companies report backing up their data, fewer than half actively back up their configurations.
CRO Mark Cravotta shared insight into the difference between organizations that have configurations backed up and those that don’t: “With no backup, you’re rebuilding from scratch in the event of significant tenant damage, breach, or loss. It takes weeks to restore data manually, and there is a risk of omitting key configurations if you are doing it from fragmented information or from memory. This can cause tremendous disruption to business operations and can cost companies millions in downtime. Think of your personal home computer and all the information you have stored. If you lost that information or the setup of the computer, it would be very difficult to replicate a backup manually. There is always going to be missing information or configurations that you’ve spent years building.”
A disaster recovery plan is only effective when it’s clearly documented. Detail every process, tool, and responsibility—ensuring that both technical staff and business leaders understand what to do, when, and how. Centralized, accessible documentation minimizes confusion during high-pressure incidents.
Customize your recovery plan to address threats unique to your business, industry, or region, such as compliance requirements, targeted cyberattacks, or natural disasters. This targeted approach ensures your plan accounts for scenarios most likely to disrupt your M365 environment.
Seamlessly connect your disaster recovery plan with your organization’s broader business continuity framework. Ensure alignment between IT processes and overall business priorities, so that recovery efforts support essential operations without creating silos or resource conflicts.
One critical part of this, according to CRO Mark Cravotta, is incorporating evidence-gathering and investigative processes and tools into business continuity and risk assessment. “Sometimes detailed forensic tools and experts are required to really understand what happened that caused a breach – and if you want to identify both what went wrong, how an incident happened, and what data was captured as well as how to avoid the same or worse happening again – you need to have evidence gathering and logs as a central part of your business approach – not just for a disaster recovery scenario.”
Testing your disaster recovery plan in real-world scenarios is crucial. Conduct regular drills and simulations to validate backup integrity, test response times, and identify gaps. This proactive approach ensures your team is prepared—and your plan actually works—when disaster strikes.
Your disaster recovery plan should evolve alongside your Microsoft 365 environment and changing threat landscape. Schedule routine reviews, updates, and improvements, incorporating lessons learned from tests and real incidents to keep your plan current and effective.
Human error is a leading cause of outages and data loss. Provide ongoing training to ensure all employees understand disaster recovery procedures, recognize threats, and know how to report issues. Building a culture of awareness supports faster incident response and reduces overall risk.
If you want to build a truly comprehensive disaster recovery plan for Microsoft 365, you will have to take both data and configurations into account. There are a variety of data sets and configuration policies that need to be backed up across different applications and services, such as Office 365, Azure, Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), Intune, SharePoint, Teams, and Exchange Online.
Here's an overview of each:
Office 365:
Azure:
Entra ID (Azure AD):
Intune:
SharePoint:
Teams:
Exchange Online:
Adopting a disaster recovery template for Microsoft 365 is essential for organizations seeking to safeguard critical business data and maintain operational continuity in the event of unexpected disruptions such as cyberattacks, accidental data loss, or service outages.
A well-designed template standardizes the procedures for backup, recovery, and communication, ensuring a streamlined, efficient response that minimizes downtime and mitigates potential damage.
Microsoft 365 includes built-in backup and retention mechanisms. While not comprehensive, they do to a certain extent help organizations protect their data and ensure business continuity. These features are designed to prevent data loss, recover deleted items and enable rapid data recovery, and comply with minimum regulatory requirements. However, they also come with several limitations that prevent them from serving as a full-fledged backup and recovery solution. For example:
Where built-in backup and retention systems prove insufficient, a number of third-party solutions exist to help you create a more thorough disaster recovery program for Microsoft 365. These tools take advantage of Microsoft's built-in Application Programming Interface (API) to integrate with services like Office 365, Azure, Entra ID, Intune, etc. and pull your data and configurations for storage off-site.
Here's a brief overview of how it works:
If you're looking for a third-party platform to automate your disaster recovery plan for Microsoft 365, there are many options to choose from. These tools integrate with Graph API to pull your data from services like Office 365, Azure, Entra ID, and Intune — then store it securely in an on-premise or cloud-based storage solution. They also offer a number of additional features, such as eDiscovery, to make it easier to back up and selectively recover data sets. For example:
Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is a popular solution designed to protect your organization's data within the Microsoft 365 environment. It ensures that all critical data across Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams is securely backed up — while allowing for on-demand restoration of individual items, such as emails, documents, list items, mailboxes, and folders.
Veeam's solution helps organizations meet compliance requirements by allowing them to maintain control over their Microsoft 365 data. It also provides additional features like eDiscovery to aid in the identification and retrieval of specific data sets. The storage architecture is designed to support organizations of any size, making it a suitable option for small businesses, enterprises, and everything in between.
AvePoint Cloud Backup is a robust backup and recovery solution for Microsoft 365 that supports Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Teams, Project Online, and more. It performs automatic backups of your data up to four times a day, ensuring that your organization's data remains protected and up to date. Organizations can customize their backup schedules to meet their specific requirements and preferences.
AvePoint offers unlimited storage for your backups, while also allowing for easy and precise recovery of individual items or entire datasets, depending on your organization's specific needs. Backups are encrypted and stored securely in AvePoint's cloud, which is compliant with various security standards, such as GDPR, HIPAA, and FedRAMP.
CoreView Configuration Manager is an end-to-end solution that automates configuration management for Microsoft 365. Unlike the other platforms on this list, Configuration Manager does not focus on data backup. Instead, it's one of the only tools that specialize in helping you back up and restore your configurations, policies, and settings across Microsoft 365.
Configuration Manager provides automated backup and restore services for a range of Microsoft 365 configurations, including Office 365, Azure, Entra ID, Intune, SharePoint, Teams, and Exchange Online. It allows for granular recovery of specific configurations or entire system states with the click of a button, with full version control and audit logging capabilities.
Microsoft 365 may be a highly capable productivity solution and the backbone of your critical business functions, but it's still subject to various threats that could impact an organization's operations.
If you’re here reading about disaster recovery, you already know that creating a disaster recovery plan for M365 is an essential protective measure for your business. A range of unexpected scenarios happen every day, which is why disaster recovery is so important:
While there's an unending list of data backup solutions to choose for when it comes to Microsoft 365, solutions that enable you to back up your configurations and settings are few and far between. Until recently, your only option would have been to go through the tiresome process of manually creating PowerShell scripts to pull your configurations using Microsoft Graph so that you can store them in an offsite location.
However, CoreView’s Configuration Manager is a premium automation tool that enables you to back up your configuration files using a no-code web interface. The process is faster, more efficient, and more resilient against the changing compliance landscape. CoreView makes it effortless to find configuration drift, audit changes, and back up and restore configurations.
Want to learn more about how you can use CoreView Configuration Manager to create a backup strategy for your M365 configurations as part of your larger disaster recovery plan?
Request a free demo today to find out!
