Most organizations have moved partially or completely to the cloud, attracted by benefits such as reduced infrastructure costs, automatic updates, and the promise of 99.9% uptime. What many organizations don’t realize is that data stored in the cloud isn’t immune to loss.
The assumption that “it’s in the cloud, so it’s backed up” has become one of the most dangerous misconceptions in modern IT. While providers protect their infrastructure, they operate under a shared responsibility model that leaves you (not them) accountable for protecting your actual data. This creates an overlooked gap in many disaster recovery strategies, one that could cost millions when disaster strikes.
What Cloud Providers Actually Protect (And What They Don’t)
Cloud providers operate under a shared responsibility model that draws a clear line between what they protect and what remains your responsibility.
All major cloud providers protect their infrastructure, which includes the physical data centers, network hardware, and service availability. However, the responsibility for data protection falls squarely on customers. According to Microsoft’s Azure documentation: “For all cloud deployment types, you own your data and identities. You’re responsible for protecting the security of your data and identities, on-premises resources, and the cloud components you control.”
Amazon Web Services is equally clear about this division. Their shared responsibility model makes it clear that while AWS manages security “of” the cloud (infrastructure, hardware, facilities), customers are responsible for security “in” the cloud, which includes all their data.
Because cloud providers disclaim responsibility for your actual data, they strongly recommend that you implement your own backup strategy:
- Microsoft’s Services Agreement states: “We strive to keep the Services up and running; however, all online services suffer occasional disruptions and outages, and Microsoft is not liable for any disruption or loss you may suffer as a result. In the event of an outage, you may not be able to retrieve Your Content or Data that you’ve stored. We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services.”
- AWS’s official shared responsibility documentation states: “You are responsible for properly configuring and using the Services and otherwise taking appropriate action to secure, protect and backup your accounts and Your Content in a manner that will provide appropriate security and protection, which might include use of encryption to protect Your Content from unauthorized access and routinely archiving Your Content.”
Ignoring these explicit recommendations for backup can lead to catastrophic consequences when data loss occurs, whether from human error, malicious attacks, or technical failures
The Real-World Consequences of Ignoring Cloud Backup
CrowdStrike’s 2025 Global Threat Report revealed there was a 26% increase in cloud intrusions in 2024 as more bad actors sought to exploit cloud services and cloud data storage. Researchers are reporting more intrusions in which attackers are gaining access via legitimate accounts (sometimes via stolen credentials), leveraging cloud environment management tools for lateral movement, and abusing cloud provider command line tools. When these attacks succeed against organizations without proper backups, the results can be catastrophic since, as explained above, the provider takes no responsibility for data loss.
Yet cyberattacks represent just one threat vector. Human error remains the leading cause of cloud data loss, accounting for 88% of data breaches according to Stanford University research.
In 2020, KPMG learned this lesson the hard way. An IT administrator attempted to delete one user’s Microsoft Teams chat history for compliance reasons but misconfigured a retention policy. The result? All Teams personal chat logs for 145,000 users were permanently erased. Despite being a major Microsoft partner, KPMG had no recourse.
Even more devastating was the case of Musey Inc., a startup that accidentally deleted its Google Workspace account in 2019. A simple administrative error (clicking the wrong button during what should have been a routine account management task) triggered a cascade of destruction. The company lost all product development data, customer information, and intellectual property. After repeated recovery attempts, the company received a one-line email from Google stating that its data had been lost.
A single data loss incident typically triggers a cascade of problems where operational disruption leads to financial losses, which trigger compliance violations, which damage reputation, which further impacts finances. This compound effect explains why even a single data loss incident can ultimately destroy strong organizations, and the impact is particularly severe for SMBs. According to the National Cyber Security Alliance, 60% of small companies go out of business within six months of experiencing a data breach or cyberattack. With the average global cost of a single breach reaching $3.62 million, many organizations simply cannot recover from the combined financial, operational, and reputational damage, which makes the cost of implementing a robust cloud backup strategy seem insignificant in comparison.
How to Implement an Effective Cloud Backup Strategy
After understanding the risks, the next challenge is creating a backup strategy that actually works when you need it.
Start with a Complete Cloud Inventory
Most organizations use more cloud services than they realize. Beyond the obvious platforms like Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, data often lives in specialized applications like Salesforce, QuickBooks Online, Slack, or industry-specific SaaS tools.
Because each cloud application represents a potential point of failure, you should always start by documenting every cloud service your organization uses. Without this visibility, you can’t protect what you don’t know exists.
Define Your Recovery Objectives
Not all data is equally important, and trying to protect everything equally is both expensive and impractical. For each data type, establish:
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO): How quickly must this data be restored? Email might need to be back within hours, while archived project files could wait days.
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO): How much data loss is acceptable? Financial records might require daily backups, while internal documentation could survive with weekly or even monthly protection.
These objectives drive every other decision in your backup strategy as they determine backup frequency, storage requirements, and ultimately, your budget.
Choose the Right Backup Approach
There are multiple ways to back up your data. However, for most SMBs, the most practical and effective method is automated backup to a separate cloud provider. This model is commonly referred to as cloud-to-cloud backup.
In a cloud-to-cloud setup, your data is continuously backed up from one cloud platform (such as Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace) to a completely separate cloud environment. The main advantages of this approach include:
- Geographic and platform separation: Backups are stored outside the original provider’s ecosystem, which protects you if the primary service suffers a security breach, regional outage, or account compromise.
- Automation: Backups happen on a set schedule (often multiple times per day) without requiring manual intervention. This reduces the risk of missed backups due to human error.
- Scalability and simplicity: There’s no hardware to buy, no software to install, and no local storage to manage. As your organization grows, your backup system scales with you.
A properly configured cloud-to-cloud backup solution separates your operational cloud environment from your backup system, which is a fundamental best practice in disaster recovery planning because it prevents scenarios where a single misconfigured policy or malicious actor can compromise both your live data and your recovery path.
At OSIbeyond, we protect our clients’ Microsoft 365 data using Dropsuite. With it, we can deliver comprehensive incremental backups with unlimited storage and no data pruning across all Microsoft 365 applications, so our clients can recover any version of their data from any point in time.
Test Recovery Procedures Regularly
The most overlooked aspect of any backup strategy is testing. Organizations often assume their backups work until they try to restore data and discover corruption, incomplete backups, or expired credentials. The last thing you want is to discover during a ransomware attack that your backups have been failing silently for months, or that the backup files are unreadable.
Recovery procedure tests can range from a simple restore of a single user’s deleted email or a specific version of a document from last month to more complex scenarios, such as a simulation of a complete account restoration to a different location or system.
Conclusion
Cloud services have transformed how businesses operate, but they haven’t eliminated the need for backup. Whether the threat comes from a cyberattack, human error, or unexpected misconfiguration, your cloud data is only as safe as your recovery plan.
The good news is that protecting your cloud data doesn’t require complex infrastructure or massive budgets. Modern cloud-to-cloud backup solutions offer automated protection, granular recovery options, and predictable pricing that make enterprise-level data protection accessible to organizations of any size. Schedule a consultation with our experts to learn how we can help you implement the right backup approach for you.