Recovery — A Critical Aspect of Data Protection

by Daivat Dholakia on December 13, 2018

As we look back at 2018, a top IT trend was unquestionably data protection. The Computer Weekly and TechTarget IT Priorities survey 2018 stated that there was a 106% increase from the previous year in organizations prioritizing data protection. This was likely due to GDPR being enforced as of May 2018, along with the increasing proliferation of ransomware and growing customer demands. More than 60% of respondents, in fact, to the “IBM Cybersecurity and Privacy Research” survey said they’re more worried about cybersecurity than war.

Data protection, however, has two facets — one focused on protecting data with encryption, firewalls, employee trainings, regular audits — and the other focused on recovering data quickly and easily, with minimal negative impact on business continuity. Backup is only as effective as accurate, rapid recovery from the backup.

Two leading SaaS applications — Office 365 and G Suite — don’t offer native recovery options that are robust and easy to use. We’ve blogged before on the recovery gaps for Office 365 and for G Suite. In this blog, we’ll take a deep dive into some of our customers’ favorite Spanning Backup for G Suite recovery features. Look for a subsequent blog on customer favorites for Office 365 and SharePoint Online.

Cross-User Restore

Spanning Backup for G Suite provides the ability to automate restoration of Drive data to a different user’s Drive, and Gmail data to a different mailbox. These features are particularly useful for fast, easy, and error-free onboarding/offboarding of employees, contractors, and seasonal temporary workers.

Self-Service Restore

Self-service restore is essential when ensuring business continuity, especially when IT teams are overloaded. An overworked and understaffed IT team can do without a late night call begging them to restore a critical email or a deleted document. There’s no need for that when easy, no-training-needed self-service restore is available through Spanning. As Aaron Kitto, National IT manager at CORE Education says, “Users are able to self-recover with Spanning Backup meaning less IT staff time is required to support these actions.”

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Point-in-Time and Granular Restores

Spanning Backup for G Suite offers options to restore from any point-in-time backup and by using search. This means it’s fast and easy to go to a last known good point-in-time backup and accurately restore it — especially helpful when recovering from ransomware, for example. Additionally, if you need to recover specific files emails or events, you can do so by browsing, searching, or filtering based on your criteria.

The video walkthroughs below will show you how quick and easy it is to recover a single file or an entire folder.

In addition to the customer favorites above, Spanning also supports restoring Team Drives data, including automatically restoring the folder structure and sharing settings.