Microsoft SharePoint Online falls under the Microsoft 365 umbrella of products and is a web-based and collaborative content services platform for document sharing, editing, content storage, enterprise social networking, and more. While primarily sold as a document management and storage system, the product is highly configurable and organizations’ usage of the platform varies substantially, commonly including custom software and personal file hosting.
SharePoint Online data, metadata and settings
SharePoint Online users can use and customize SharePoint Online sites in a myriad of ways to enable organizations to achieve a consistent and standard content access experience for its business-critical data. This reduces time, effort, and increases collaboration efficiency in the following ways.
- Managing data in SharePoint sites:
- Adding content using document libraries, list and site pages.
- Adding new custom columns, content type, and term store to provide consistent metadata definition for documents.
- Creating custom lists and document libraries based on specific requirements.
- Managing settings at each level of site collection:
- Leveraging robust permissions and access controls to allow granular permissions in site collections, site, subsite, and site content.
- Defining settings for each content type to make certain metadata mandatory or modify certain attributes of content types.
- Defining the major and minor versioning settings or check-in/check out settings for documents.
- Enabling or disabling features at site and site collection level. For example, organizations can enable “SharePoint server publishing infrastructure” for richer web pages.
- Managing view for published content:
- Defining master pages to enforce a consistent look and behavior for all pages.
- Defining list or document library view with a customized look. For example, a view could be created for the completed tasks and another view could be created for tasks assigned to a specific user.
However, despite Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online’s continued success as a collaboration platform, there are gaps in its data protection capabilities. Most importantly, Microsoft leaves the end-user responsible for the backup and protection of all data created. Therefore, when integrating Microsoft 365, an organization’s IT data protection strategy should inevitably include the protection and secure backup of SharePoint Online along with the platform’s other applications, such as OneDrive, Exchange Online, and Teams.
Druva recently published a blog highlighting the risks of leaving your Microsoft 365 data unprotected. We invite you to read that blog to learn more.
Continue reading below for an in-depth discussion of how Druva’s cloud data protection and backup for Microsoft 365 extends these advantages to SharePoint Online.
SharePoint Online protection with Druva
Protecting data, metadata, settings, and customizations across site collection is one of the main jobs for a SharePoint administrator, especially when SharePoint site collection can be accessed, collaborated, and edited by multiple users in an organization. Imagine, an accidental file deletion or settings change by a user causes a data or configuration loss. This would disrupt the business continuity of the organization, leaving the administrator to recover the SharePoint site to its last good state within an acceptable RTO.
Druva’s Microsoft 365 backup and protection solution can address all these questions and more.The solution drastically simplifies the management of Microsoft 365 data, freeing organizations free to support new cloud initiatives and accelerate projects. Druva delivers critical insights, and security for this data by offering the following key advantages.
- Robust backup — Along with site contents, Druva protects customizations, metadata, settings, and security permissions at document library, list, site, and site collections levels.
- Backup exclusion — Druva excludes the dormant or inconsequential document libraries and lists from backup to decrease backup and recovery time.
- Simple and effective recovery — SharePoint site recovery is possible for site content at granular level. Moreover, backup admins can search, locate, and recover files within specific SharePoint backups for faster recovery.
- Optimized document recovery — Helps to recover the backed up site contents to another existing site or a new site.
- Robust backup and restore monitoring — Enables SharePoint backup admins to reconcile protected data with the data present in the customer’s SharePoint environment, and delivers insight into backup and restore activities.
Read the introduction to Druva inSync for SharePoint Online to learn more about the specific capabilities we offer.
Key takeaways
Druva provides enhanced support for the protection of customer Microsoft 365 data, including SharePoint Online, a powerful collaboration platform for document sharing.
This enhanced functionality delivers central visibility and management across all sites, simplifying backup, enhancing security, and enabling organizations to accelerate and protect their cloud projects. With this support, Druva delivers customers several advantages to SharePoint Online backup and data protection, including customizable backup frequency, flexible recovery location, on-demand restore, and granular restore capabilities.
Looking to learn more about how Druva’s comprehensive Microsoft 365 backup solution can better protect your organization’s business-critical data? Read our CTO’s recent blog detailing best practices for protecting your organization’s Microsoft 365 investment.