It's the question every IT lead eventually asks: Microsoft runs 365, it's highly available and geo-redundant — so surely my email and files are 'backed up'? The uncomfortable answer is that Microsoft protects the platform, not your data, and the gap between those two things is exactly where most real-world data loss happens. This is the straight version of the shared-responsibility argument, what Microsoft's own native backup does and doesn't cover, and how to decide.
The shared-responsibility gap
Microsoft's job is to keep the service running: uptime, infrastructure, datacentre redundancy, and short-term replication so a hardware failure doesn't take your tenant down. Your job is your data — and Microsoft is explicit about this in its services agreement. The things that actually destroy data are on your side of the line: accidental deletion, a malicious or departing employee, ransomware that encrypts what syncs to the cloud, and retention policies that quietly purge items after a window you may not control.
Native safety nets — the recycle bin, retention policies, litigation hold — are short-term and can be turned off, overridden or simply outlasted. They are not designed to let you restore a mailbox or a SharePoint site to how it looked four months ago. That capability is what a backup gives you.
What about Microsoft 365 Backup (the native add-on)?
Microsoft now sells its own native backup. It's genuinely useful for fast restore within a limited window and keeps data inside the Microsoft trust boundary. But most independent backup vendors go further on the things that matter for resilience: longer (often unlimited) retention, data-residency choices, immutable and air-gapped copies isolated from the tenant, and cross-tenant or cross-cloud recovery. A copy that lives outside the platform it's protecting is the whole point of a backup — and that's where third-party tools earn their place.
Who genuinely needs it (and who might not)
If you have compliance retention obligations, handle regulated data, have ever had a near-miss with a deleted mailbox, or simply can't tolerate losing months of Teams, SharePoint or Exchange history, third-party backup is no longer optional. If you're a very small, low-risk team relying entirely on short native retention, you're carrying a risk you may not have priced. The honest filter is recovery: ask 'if a user — or an attacker — deleted everything today and it emptied the recycle bin, could I get it back in three months?' For most organisations the answer with native tools alone is no.
How to choose
The market is crowded — Veeam, AvePoint, Acronis, Commvault, Dropsuite, Druva and others — and they differ on what they back up (watch for Teams chat and Entra ID), where data is stored, UK data residency, immutability, retention and how they're delivered. Rather than wade through vendor marketing, line them up side by side and estimate the cost for your seat count.
We built a free, vendor-neutral Microsoft 365 backup comparison tool to do exactly that — filter by what you need, see an indicative per-user cost, and shortlist. Servnet can then supply and manage the right one for your tenant.