Backing Up More Than Just Cloud Email
The technology forecast calls for increased cloud coverage…
It’s been a few years since I wrote an article about the importance of backing up SaaS applications. A lot has changed around how data and applications are stored and accessed by firms across the globe.
Back in 2020, we were primarily focused on backing up Exchange Online (Email, Calendar, Contacts, etc.). Technology shifted to the cloud during the pandemic, I wrote a follow-up article about backing up Teams data in response to its rapid rate of adoption.
Fast forward to current day 2025, we see an uptick in organizations moving the majority of their systems to the cloud, and a dwindling number of companies maintaining on-premises server infrastructure. With the growing popularity of Microsoft Entra ID, Intune and Conditional Access Policies, people are asking how the data and configurations can be backed up in case of an unintentional change or deletion to a configuration.
To deliver an extensive SaaS and IaaS backup offering, Kraft Kennedy has partnered with AvePoint, whose solutions tout one of the largest SaaS userbases in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. In addition to being able to backup Microsoft 365 data, AvePoint enables the backup of Azure IaaS components such as virtual machines and Azure Files data. A key differentiator is the ability to protect what most other systems cannot provide: the backup of Entra ID, Defender configurations, Intune configurations and Conditional Access Policies.
AvePoint provides flexibility in backup storage location as well. Users can choose to backup to their own cloud storage, or an organization to Azure or AWS storage managed by AvePoint.
With the growing complexity of cloud configurations, being able to restore a configuration to a known working state can be far simpler than trying to troubleshoot what went wrong and manually revert changes. A good example of this making a misconfiguration in a Microsoft Conditional Access Policy and locking out all logins from within the United States instead of outside of the US. Unless you catch it in time, getting back in can be quite difficult. With AvePoint, you can restore directly back into Azure to regain access.
Backing up cloud configurations may not seem important to non-technical decision makers because it doesn’t include end user data. However, when a broken or lost configuration results in downtime, quicker recovery is something that everyone can get behind.
Interested in discussing other approaches to cloud, backups, or data?
Connect with Kraft Kennedy to discuss your unique environment and goals for the future.