When you implement a cloud solution like Office 365 within your enterprise, you are taking a powerful step towards enhanced productivity, efficiency, and accessibility. It is essential to note, however, that no offering – Office 365 or otherwise – can be all things to all customers. For instance, even though Office 365 comes in a variety of packages with different capabilities and at a wide range of price points, decision-makers must remember that the offering is intended to serve the specific needs of a large, enterprise audience. The core capabilities of Office 365, while powerful, are not necessarily built to be a comprehensive solution for companies’ data availability and governance requirements.
In fact, this is why Gartner Research strongly recommends organizations deployed on Office 365 use third-party offerings to address gaps in its native capabilities. These third-party features include those that fill these gaps for legal hold management, eDiscovery, DLP, ransomware recovery, advanced threat protection, encryption, and business continuity. While Office 365 includes a number of these capabilities, the platform cannot be all things to all organizations, so it contains some deficiencies that purpose-built, third-party offerings can more adequately address. Often times, these capabilities come with a better price-point than Microsoft can offer.
Business Case For Third-Party Apps
Office 365 includes an entire suite of SaaS applications that offer a range of valuable capabilities which organizations rely on every day to help them be more productive in achieving business goals. However, these powerful tools are not the purpose-built products that are needed to address the key concerns of availability and data governance. As a result, an increasing number of organizations have taken action to address the gaps in end user data protection, data recovery, legal hold and eDiscovery, as well as the third-party management of Office 365 archival data.
The chart below helps provide a clear picture of why having a third-party data protection and governance offering, in conjunction with Office 365, is critical, and provides a major benefit (capabilities and price-point) to any organization.