Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is responsible for backing up and restoring Exchange, OneDrive, and SharePoint online data. More people than ever are using these products to store business critical data due to its portability, moving between computers in the office, at home and the mobile devices in-between. This portability also opens the data up to more access points, leaving it vulnerable to unwanted modifications both from malicious attacks and unexpected user error. A ransomware attack can be just as devastating to your data as a user deleting or modifying the wrong shared SharePoint site.
What most administrators don’t know is that Microsoft protects the underlying hardware where the data sits but not the data itself, meaning if someone was to modify your data through an access point, Microsoft is not responsible for restoring it back to a previous state. Read more about where Microsoft protection stops in our Office 365 Shared Responsibility Model blog post. Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 helps fill this protection gap so you’re able to restore your data no matter the situation. The following articles in this series will help you get started with the product so you can start protecting your Microsoft Office 365 environment today.
Prerequisites
Before starting with the install, it’s recommended to have the computer on the domain if you plan on putting it on the domain. It’s not supported to change the name of the machine or put it on the domain after the software is installed. If you do make any of these changes, the software will need the configuration to be reset and all components reconfigured.
Permissions
Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 needs credentials to connect to the Office 365 organization. There are two authentication types offered: Basic and Modern.
Basic authentication requires a Microsoft account within the organization with the correct permissions assigned in SharePoint, AzureAD and Exchange Online admin centers.
When using modern authentication, you will be asked to supply an Application ID paired with an Application secret or Application certificate and a Microsoft account with the required permissions paired with a user App password. You’re also given the option to have a separate credential set from the Exchange Online authentication to SharePoint and OneDrive authentication for both authorization types.
The specific permissions needed are detailed in the Required Permissions section of the user guide.
There’s also this Veeam Office 365 Complete Permissions step-by-step configuration knowledge base article on how to configure these permissions in Azure for both basic and modern authentication.
Adding the organization
After you configured the proper credentials, you’re ready to add the organization to the console. Adding an organization to the console offers a few options based on your environment starting with your deployment type. The options presented are Microsoft Office 365, On-Premises and Hybrid.
NOTE: if you’re using an account that is a part of Active Directory Federation services, you can’t add a Microsoft Office 365 organization using modern authentication and you can’t add on-premises organizations due to authentication limitations.
Once you selected your deployment type, you can select what services you would like to back up from this organization: Exchange Online, OneDrive and SharePoint Online for Microsoft Office 365, Exchange and SharePoint Server for on-premises.
Next, if you’re connecting to a Microsoft Office 365 organization, you’ll be asked to select your region. Currently offered regions are the Default, which is your standard local region, Germany and China. We also have experimental support for U.S. government GCC high and U.S. government DOD.
After you’ve chosen your proper region, you can select the authentication type you would like to use from the above section. You can read more on organization management and limitations from the user guide.
Proxies and repositories
Proxies in Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 play the same role as proxies in Veeam Backup & Replication as they both move data to the repository, but that is where the similarities stop. Unlike proxies in Veeam Backup & Replication, repositories are tied to one proxy. You can add multiple repositories to a single machine acting as a proxy to split up your data based on the expected size.
The supported repository types are:
- Local storage
- Direct attached storage like iSCSI/FC/SAN
- Object storage
- We also offer experimental support for SMB 3.0 shares
When you use Object storage, it will ask you to also select a local repository. This repository is not to store the backup files but the backup meta data which will contain the file hierarchy. Sizing the proxy and repository will be in the next article, but for more information on the supported components, see the Backup Infrastructure section of our user guide.
Reporting
Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 offers three built-in reports
- Mailbox Protection report allows you to see the mailboxes that have been protected in the last 31 days from your organization including group, public, shared and resource mailboxes. This can be a fast way to see if there is mailbox left out from your backups and why before the user needs to restore something.
- Storage Consumption report allows you to see the mailboxes that have been protected in the last 31 days from your organization including group, public, shared and resource mailboxes. This can be a fast way to see if there is mailbox left out from your backups and why before the user needs to restore something.
- License Overview report allows you to see which repositories have the most growth, most usage and daily change rates. This report is great for making sure you have enough space on the repository to support the backups.
All of these reports offer valuable insight into your backup environment. Find out more about each type of report in our Reporting section of the user guide.
Restore explorers
There are three restore explorers packaged into the Veeam Office 365 environment, each tailored to the type of application you would need to recover.
- Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange allows you to recover all Outlook-associated items like mail, calendar and contacts.
- Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint allows you to restore everything from libraries and lists down to individual items.
- Veeam Explorer for Microsoft OneDrive for Business allows you to restore entire accounts, folders and any document saved in the sub folders.
Each explorer offers you the ability to restore data back to both original and new locations, and even download it locally. Coming in a later section, we will dive into each of these explorers’ benefits, including eDiscovery. You can read about all our explorers in Veeam Explorers Overview section.
By now, you should have a better understanding of the components that make up Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 and the role they play in the process. The next section will cover how to properly size your repository and proxy, configurations for different jobs, and how to read your job statistics.
