Before Microsoft Costs Rise, Check Your Cloud Backup and Data Protection

Your business data lives in Microsoft 365, so it’s safe. It’s a reasonable assumption, and a costly one.

Microsoft has confirmed that new commercial Microsoft 365 pricing takes effect from 1 July 2026, with existing customers moving to the new rates at their next renewal after that date. For most businesses, a review of licence costs is already being planned.

That review is a sensible moment to ask a bigger question: if something happened to your data tomorrow, could you actually get it back?

It’s the question that exposes the gap in most setups, and the reason Microsoft 365 backup, cloud data protection, and a tested recovery plan deserve a place on the agenda before your renewal lands.

Microsoft 365 Doesn’t Remove the Need for Backup

Microsoft operates under what’s known as a shared responsibility model. In plain terms, Microsoft looks after the platform itself, including the physical infrastructure, service availability, and replication across its data centres.

What sits with you, the customer, is the data inside that platform: your Exchange Online mailboxes, your SharePoint libraries, your OneDrive files, and your Teams content.

The distinction that catches businesses out is that replication isn’t the same as backup. If a file is deleted, overwritten, or encrypted by ransomware, that change is replicated too. Microsoft’s own service agreement reflects this, recommending that customers regularly back up the content they store on its services.

Native retention features help to a point. Recycle bins and retention policies cover short windows and specific scenarios, but they aren’t designed to bring a business back from accidental deletion discovered months later, a malicious insider, or a ransomware incident that spreads through a tenant.

For that, you need a backup that’s held independently and can be restored on your terms.

Data Protection Belongs in Every Cloud Review

When the conversation is only about cost, it’s easy to overlook the controls that protect the data itself. A useful cloud review looks at how information is kept secure, accurate, and available. The areas worth checking include:

• Encryption, so data is protected both when it’s stored and when it’s moving between systems and users.
• Redundancy, so a single point of failure doesn’t take your business-critical information with it.
• Retention, so data is kept for as long as the business and any regulators require and no longer.
• Data integrity, so you can trust that information hasn’t been altered, corrupted, or partially lost.

These aren’t abstract concerns. The UK government’s Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/2026 found that 43% of businesses identified a cyber security breach or attack in the previous twelve months, equivalent to around 612,000 organisations.

The proportion of breaches that led to lost revenue or share value more than doubled year on year, rising from 2% to 5%.

Backup and Recovery Protect Business Continuity

Backup is only half the story. The other half is recovery, and specifically how quickly and completely you can get back to working.

This is where two terms are worth knowing. Your recovery point objective (RPO) describes how much data you can afford to lose, measured in time. Your recovery time objective (RTO) describes how long you can afford to be without your systems.

A business that backs up once a day has an RPO of up to twenty-four hours, which may be fine for some and unacceptable for others. Defining these targets turns “we have backups” into “we know exactly what recovery looks like.”

A well-run approach to Microsoft 365 and wider cloud data tends to include the following:

• Automated backups that run reliably without depending on someone remembering to start them.
• Compliance archiving that keeps records available and searchable for as long as obligations require.
• Quick recovery that can restore individual items or whole environments without a drawn-out rebuild.
• Defined RPO and RTO targets agreed in advance, so expectations are clear before anything goes wrong.

At Redinet, our cloud services are built around exactly this principle, helping businesses keep their data backed up, archived in line with their obligations, and recoverable to agreed targets.

Cloud Resilience Matters More for Regulated Businesses

If your business handles sensitive or regulated data, the stakes around recovery are higher.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) treats the security and recoverability of personal data as a requirement under UK GDPR, and these obligations need to hold up consistently across Microsoft 365 and any other cloud platforms you rely on, not just in one part of the environment.

The threat backdrop reinforces why this matters. The NCSC’s 2025 Annual Review describes ransomware as one of the most acute and pervasive cyber threats facing UK organisations, with attackers selecting victims based on who is most likely to pay rather than which sector they’re in. The NCSC is also explicit that reliable, well-protected backups are central to ransomware resilience.

For regulated firms, that means strong cloud resilience working on three fronts: recovery planning that’s documented and tested rather than assumed, secure access so only the right people can reach your data, and audit-friendly controls that show a regulator, insurer, or client who accessed what and when.

The Right Support Helps Reduce Disruption

Most businesses don’t have the time or the in-house specialism to keep all of this under regular review, and that’s reasonable. The value of the right cloud partner is that backup, recovery, and data protection become something that’s actively managed rather than something you hope is working.

At Redinet, we work with businesses across London and the South East to keep cloud data protected, recoverable, and aligned with longer-term resilience goals.

The Microsoft pricing change is a practical reason to start that conversation now, while there’s time to act before renewal rather than after an incident.

Strengthen Your Cloud Backup and Recovery

Before Microsoft costs change, make sure your business data is protected and recoverable.

Speak to Redinet about cloud backup, disaster recovery, and Microsoft 365 data protection. Ready to speak to an expert?