Microsoft 365 Retention Is Not Backup
Ask an IT team whether their Microsoft 365 data is backed up. You will usually get a confident yes. Then ask a follow-up. What happens if a finance director deletes a mailbox folder in March and nobody notices until June? The confidence tends to fade around that point. Microsoft 365 retention policies preserve data for compliance. They do not restore it. Under Microsoft's shared responsibility model, Microsoft guarantees platform availability and infrastructure resilience while the customer remains responsible for the data itself. Standard Microsoft 365 licenses do not include a backup solution, and the native recovery windows are shorter than most organizations assume. Does Microsoft Back Up Your Microsoft 365 Data? Not