Backing up Microsoft workloads at enterprise scale isn’t just complex — it’s a high-stakes balancing act between performance, scale, and the invisible ceiling of API throttling.
As organizations generate petabytes of data across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure products, IT teams are under pressure to ensure fast, reliable, and SLA-driven backups — without running into bottlenecks or delays. And with Microsoft enforcing strict API usage quotas, even the most well-intentioned backup strategies can falter under load.
That’s where Druva comes in.
With a decade of cloud-native expertise and a platform architected for scale, Druva helps thousands of enterprises back up their Microsoft workloads efficiently without stress and without compromise. In this blog, we’ll explore how Druva delivers seamless, intelligent, and scalable backup and restore for Microsoft environments of any size.
The Enterprise Backup Challenge
At enterprise scale, protecting Microsoft workloads is a balancing act between backing up data, fast, reliably, and meeting SLAs.
If you're an IT administrator responsible for petabytes of data across hundreds of thousands of Microsoft 365 users and SharePoint sites, you're already familiar with the sheer complexity of this task. As your environment grows, so do the stakes, and the questions you should be asking.
How long will it take to complete first-time backups for all Microsoft 365 objects?
Can the backup solution scale to meet daily SLAs, even as more data is generated every day?
What happens when we reach the limits of what Microsoft allows us to back up?
These are the performance realities that enterprise IT teams face every day. Microsoft workloads — from Exchange Online and OneDrive to SharePoint and Teams — generate a constant stream of data. And while the need to back up this data is obvious, doing it at scale, within defined SLAs, and without interruption is far from simple. The problem often isn’t the backup tool itself. It’s the invisible ceiling every enterprise eventually hits: Microsoft API throttling.
When your backup solution makes too many API calls too quickly, Microsoft enforces limits to protect its infrastructure. This throttling can quietly disrupt backup performance, delay restore times, and even interfere with the normal usage of Microsoft 365 services.
That’s why scale alone isn’t enough. You need a backup solution that’s not only cloud-native, but API-aware — one that adapts intelligently to avoid throttling before it impacts your environment. Let’s take a closer look at what throttling is and why it's such a critical piece of the enterprise-scale backup puzzle.
What Is Microsoft API Throttling? (And Why It Matters)
API throttling is Microsoft’s way of protecting its cloud, but for enterprise IT teams, it can be a silent killer of backup performance.
When backing up Microsoft workloads, Druva uses Microsoft Graph APIs to access data across services like Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Entra ID, and Dynamics 365. These APIs are powerful but limited. Microsoft enforces tenant-specific quotas to ensure fair and consistent use of its shared backend resources. Once you exceed your allocated quota — based on your tenant’s size, activity, and behavior — Microsoft slows or denies further API calls. This is called throttling, and it’s designed to protect Microsoft’s infrastructure, prevent performance degradation for all users, and enforce fair usage across millions of tenants.
But for your backup jobs, throttling means:
Incomplete or failed backups
Slow or stalled restore operations
Missed SLAs and increased recovery times
Disruption to other Microsoft services running in the same tenant
Here’s the challenge: You can’t disable throttling and you can’t predict it perfectly. It varies between tenants, changes over time, and depends on how much activity is happening across all Microsoft 365 services. That’s why traditional backup tools — even those built for the cloud — struggle to keep up at scale.
The answer isn’t to avoid throttling — it’s to outsmart it. And that’s exactly what Druva’s architecture is built to do.
Druva’s Solution: A Cloud-Native Architecture for Enterprise-Scale Backup
Solving the enterprise backup challenge requires smart, scalable architecture designed specifically for the cloud.
Druva’s approach is fundamentally different from traditional backup solutions. From day one, Druva was purpose-built to run 100% in the cloud — with no hardware, no agents, and no infrastructure to manage. This allows enterprises to scale effortlessly while maintaining performance, flexibility, and control across diverse Microsoft workloads.
