[Closed] Office 365 for a business - expert opinions needed please!

I might be able to offer an longer response when I can get to a keyboard.

MSs servers are secure and I’ve never known them lose anything. As an MS partner I’ve had them recover stuff that’s been deleted (messy HR issue) that on the face of it shouldn’t have been recoverable. Saying that some of our larger clients prefer to have a back up.

Lots of smaller businesses are using SharePoint as a file server, that’s not really it’s primary purpose, it’s a colabrative tool - but it does work well in that role. Versioning is a god send. You should make yourself aware of potential issues with long file names and non-office suite files - having multiple users being able to amend the same file at the same time is really cool.

AV isn’t really a function of 365, defender is very good and I’d recommend it over any other free product - but as a business I’d want the support of a paid product. ESET is outstanding at that.

If you're on Office 365,you're all backed up, that's a big part of the sell.

As for AV, I'm not sure.

I might be able to offer an longer response when I can get to a keyboard.

MSs servers are secure and I’ve never known them lose anything. As an MS partner I’ve had them recover stuff that’s been deleted (messy HR issue) that on the face of it shouldn’t have been recoverable. Saying that some of our larger clients prefer to have a back up.

Lots of smaller businesses are using SharePoint as a file server, that’s not really it’s primary purpose, it’s a colabrative tool – but it does work well in that role. Versioning is a god send. You should make yourself aware of potential issues with long file names and non-office suite files – having multiple users being able to amend the same file at the same time is really cool.

AV isn’t really a function of 365, defender is very good and I’d recommend it over any other free product – but as a business I’d want the support of a paid product. ESET is outstanding at that.

Pretty much this. I work at an MSP (managed service provider) and a large part of my day to day work involves Office 365, sharepoint, onedrive.

How big is your file server? Also, do your desktops/laptops run W10? Sharepoint and Onedrive are OK as file servers, but if you're got a lot of data it can get messy. W10 onedrive has the 'files on demand' feature which W7 doesn't have, this allows users to manage which files are actually stored on the local machines. If you had 1TB of sharepoint data and were running W7, any users who wanted to sync the whole of that to their machine (to be accessed via windows explorer rather than the sharepoint website) would need to store it ALL on their machine, which obviously causes storage issues. W10 allows users to sync just the file/folder structure and download individual files/folders to be available offline.

Depending on the licence version you choose you'll also get the full office 365 suite which is pretty good, it allows multiple installs per user. Email access across devices is simplified too, the android outlook app is very good, Teams (which is replacing Skype for business) is also decent. And of course you can access emails anywhere with an internet browser. Just make sure to have MFA turned on, as the downside of access from anywhere with an internet connection is the amount of phished accounts. Without MFA it's a regular occurrence... 🙁

Sharepoint permissions are a horrible thing, but if you go to an MSP it won't be your problem... 😀

AV - any decent MSP will be able to provide a deployable system managed centrally by them, we use Webroot and it's pretty decent, rarely have any issues.

Just rolled out a managed service utilising Defender for a defence client, its considered good enough these days I think (cost is a factor, obviously). They were particularly sensitive in the security space, but deemed it acceptable.

They did have some additional 'controls' though, but I wouldn't have an issue with it for general usage.

Microsoft Technology Strategist here. I work with large enterprise customers so that's my main experience. What they've said above I'd agree with, and their experience may be much more relevant to you than mine!

Back-ups - I've seen the odd question about this, but when companies look into the detail of what's provided already then very few use anything extra. Most of the cases seem to be to cover situations where something has been deleted, then properly deleted, then recycling periods have passed. So it's more to cover user driven loss than failure. If you want to stop this happening, there are built in capabilities for legal holds, data retention periods etc. Some people clearly do their own back-ups, as there wouldn't be third party products available if there wasn't a market.

Data retention policies/tools: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/securitycompliance/retention-policies

For "accidental" loss/failure, I wouldn't have any concerns. There are multiple copies of your data across a geography. Off the top of my head (and I'm a generalist, not a specialist), there are 3 copies in your main location (spread over different Data Centres), then three in a paired location, e.g. Dublin/Amsterdam.

(I've just looked this up, for fun. The most common pattern for email is 4 copies in 4 DCs,
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/securitycompliance/office-365-exchange-data-resiliency )

AV - We use Defender ATP ourselves, nothing else on our PCs. However it's an extra cost so consider it a paid product over and above the Defender that comes with most versions of W10. Defender ATP is more than just endpoint protection too, so it might be overkill unless you've got people to look after the service overall. It's really really clever though, a huge amount of intelligence behind the service.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsforbusiness/windows-atp

What do you mean by hosted by an office 365 reseller? Why would you buy o365 viana reseller?