If your business uses Microsoft Exchange Online, you need to regularly back up your Exchange data.
Exchange environments house mailbox data that often includes sensitive corporate communications, user credentials, and compliance-related information. So if they're accidentally deleted—or, worse, hit by a cyberattack—your business will be in big trouble.
While Exchange does have native features that help mitigate risk, they aren’t substitutes for a comprehensive backup solution. Robust third-party Exchange backup software adds vital layers of protection by providing point-in-time snapshots, granular recovery, and reliable disaster recovery capabilities.
Why You Need Microsoft Exchange Backup Software
Data on Exchange servers is subject to the dangers familiar to any sysadmin: hardware could glitch, cloud services could fail to sync properly, or criminal gangs could encrypt your data and demand ransom payment for its return.
Secure, regular backups are essential for protecting business continuity and safeguarding mission-critical communication infrastructure. But a robust backup of Exchange data, as part of a larger backup retention policy, can protect against these threats by:
Supporting business continuity: Most knowledge workers are adrift without access to their email or calendars, and temporary or permanent loss to the information in those systems can grind productivity to a halt.
Achieving point-in-time recovery: If your systems have been corrupted or infected with malware, you need to be able to restore to a known good state as precisely as possible.
Ensuring regulatory compliance: For many industries, a robust backup regime is mandated by law to ensure data is available to regulators and customers.
Microsoft's native Exchange retention policies can't meet most requirements for long-term, compliant backup. For instance, Exchange Online only preserves soft deletes for 30 days, but industries regulated by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act must preserve certain emails for up to seven years.
Rubrik’s Exchange Server and Exchange Online Backup Capabilities
Rubrik Security Cloud goes beyond native tools to provide robust backup Microsoft Exchange environments. Capabilities include:
Support for Exchange Online and Microsoft 365
A forever incremental backup architecture that drives capacity savings and network efficiencies.
An SLA policy engine helps you automatically set backup frequency and retention length.
Rubrik’s architecture can scale across large Exchange deployments and Microsoft 365 tenants without adding infrastructure complexity. And backups are stored with zero-trust security in mind, thanks to an immutable, air-gapped architecture, protecting your data from ransomware and insider threats.
Granular Recovery for Exchange Mailbox Data
Imagine an employee accidentally deletes an email thread from an M365 Exchange Online server that contains critical contract details found nowhere else. With Rubrik, you can quickly search across backup snapshots for that employee's mailbox, locate the email by sender or keyword, and restore it instantly.
Rubrik customers have a number of tools for recovering Exchange Online data:
Restore individual emails, attachments, or entire mailboxes: Rubrik supports a wide range of recovery options—from in-place mailbox restoration to individual email or calendar item recovery, PST export, or even restoring to a different user account.
Fast search and retrieval with indexed metadata: Rubrik’s powerful metadata engine allows administrators to search point-in-time backups by subject, sender, recipient, or date.
Recovery across hybrid and cloud-native environments: Rubrik handles backups across platforms through a unified interface.
Seamless Cloud Integration and Scalability
Rubrik bridges the gap between your infrastructure and Exchange Online by delivering a unified, cloud-native backup and recovery experience.
Cloud-native backups: Rubrik provides a SaaS-based, cloud-native architecture designed for simplicity and control that gives you control over where Exchange Online data is stored.
Disaster recovery in the cloud: Rubrik’s integration with Microsoft 365 Backup leverages Microsoft’s enhanced APIs to provide faster restores.
Simplified hybrid management: Rubrik offers a unified interface to manage protection across cloud Exchange environments. From SLA-driven automation to search and recovery, everything works through a single console.
According to Microsoft, native features like Shadow Redundancy and Safety Net provide resiliency in message transport, but they don't constitute backup and cannot substitute for a full retention or disaster recovery strategy. To follow best Exchange practices, you'll want a more comprehensive solution.
Simplify Your Exchange Backup Strategy with Rubrik
Protecting Microsoft Exchange Online requires more than native tools or short-term retention settings. To meet today’s demands for compliance, business continuity, and fast recovery, organizations need a third-party solution designed for resilience.
Rubrik delivers exactly that: efficient, secure, and scalable server backup across Exchange environments. From point-in-time and granular recovery to seamless hybrid cloud integration, Rubrik ensures your Exchange backup software keeps pace with the critical role email and calendar data plays in modern business.
Contact Rubrik to learn more.