Report: The state of Office 365 backup

The worldwide shift to remote work during the pandemic has intensified the challenges associated with protecting Office 365 data.

To capture current opinions and perspectives about Office 365, data security, backup and recovery, SaaS solutions, and a variety of related topics, Barracuda commissioned independent market researcher Censuswide to survey IT decision makers in the United States, EMEA, and APAC. The results of that research were published in the new report, The state of Office 365 backup.

The survey includes responses from 1,828 executives, individual contributors, and team managers with responsibility for their organization’s cloud infrastructure. They came from organizations in companies with 50 or more employees.

Key insights on Office 365 backup

The report uncovers four key takeaways about the challenges organizations are facing protecting their Office 365 data and the concerns and priorities they have in this area.

Protecting data against attack and loss—both from outside actors and inside sources—is a key concern.

• 72% of respondents are concerned that their Office 365 data could be the target of ransomware.


• 52% say their organization has experienced a ransomware attack.

Organizations want granular restore and other functionality not available in Microsoft’s native capabilities.  

• 77% of IT decision makers agree that granular restore of Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams is important to them.


• 79% want to be able to recover mailboxes to another location or user.

Data protection is both a security and a regulatory concern.

• 69% of respondents are concerned about data being backed up outside their geography (geo residency).


• More than 7 in 10 respondents are concerned about compliance with data privacy requirements.

Organizations prefer a SaaS solution that is fast and easy to get up and running.

• 74% of the IT decision makers surveyed say that SaaS backup for Office 365—i.e., no hardware or software to maintain—is important to them.


• Roughly 8 in 10 want to be able to start running their first backups immediately upon signing up for a new data protection solution.

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