Litigation and IT: A Guide on Veeam365
No business wants to be in a situation where they need to prove themselves in a legal battle. But this is one of the things that happens to plenty of people and is one of the reasons why we speak so heavily about data backup. Whether you are dealing with an accident or a malicious attack, you need to be able to pull data from a source that you know for sure is holding all your backups. We have just the solution for these recovery and litigation needs: Veeam.
So, what is litigation and how does it apply to IT? Litigation is the legal process of settling conflicts where action is taken in court, evidence is provided, and a case is argued. With IT this could include conflicts with contracts, copyrights, hacking, online transactions and much more. While we advocate for the need for backup with all these situations, today we will focus on an example of malicious deletion and copywriting.
Nobody knows a person’s breaking point. Say one day, sadly, you must let an employee go. Unfortunately, this person has access to all your important information and deletes it all before clearing out their desk. This is where we begin the litigation process to hold this person accountable and introduce Veeam365.
Veeam365 is an amazing solution for Data Recovery. If you already have this tool installed it will be connected to and backing up your O365 environment. This includes emails, documents, and personal and conversation files. In a situation of malicious deletion, what you need to do is open the Veeam365 console and determine the backup job with the data you want to recover. Different backup jobs can be separated by archives such as SharePoint or Teams. Once you’ve chosen the backup job there should be a restore point linked to the date of the backup of the deleted files you are looking for. From here you can begin the recovery process. Once it is completed, we advise making sure there is still a backup in place and making a copy of this important document for your legal process.
Veeam365 also has some cool features to use when files aren’t deleted when it comes to litigation. One of these features is the data discovery tool. In this example, say someone steals a document and copyrights it over your original copy. Veeam365’s search and recovery allows you to go across multiple Microsoft Platforms and search for files using dates, file types, keywords, and specific mailboxes or sender/recipient information. Again, we would recommend making sure this data is backed up and copied before going forward and complying with any legal processes.
One thing to keep in mind is that most companies don’t hold on to data forever. This is known as data retention. At some point the data is discarded or overwritten, and the time of deletion normally falls under retention regulations. The data retention is directly related to storage space and costs. After a certain time if data falls out of a retention period, you can either expand your storage space by paying more, or you can pick and choose important data and archive it to a secondary-storage option for long-term storage while deleting the rest.
When it comes to a trial there are a few things to note. One of them is that the O365 Litigation Hold does not backup data. If you want to back up your data, we recommend a third-party source such as the Veeam365 solution that is connected through Microsoft’s O365. This third-party solution with Veeam can give you the option of comprehensive backups and recovery options. These options need to be licensed and configured to your Office 365 environment. With this solution not much can fall through the cracks. If you need help setting up Veeam365 or need help converting over to Microsoft’s Office 365 to be able to use Veeam’s third-party solution, give us a call and we would be glad to help.