Why the Cloud Doesn’t Replace Backups: Protect Your Business Data

Many businesses believe: “Because our data is stored in Google or Microsoft cloud, we don’t need to worry about backups.” That seems logical. After all, cloud providers promise high availability, redundancy, and resilient infrastructure. But if you lean on that alone, there are significant risks.

Here’s why having a third party cloud backup is still essential, what Google and Microsoft themselves say, and how this fits into our managed IT service plans.

Shared Responsibility: What Google and Microsoft Actually Do, and What They Don’t

Both Google (Google Cloud and Google Workspace) and Microsoft (Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365) operate under a shared responsibility model. The cloud provider is responsible for many things like physical security of data centres, underlying infrastructure, service uptime, and some resiliency. The customer (you, or your IT provider) is responsible for your data: how it’s used, accessed, deleted, restored, and secured.

Microsoft

• Microsoft’s Services Agreement explicitly states:

  “We recommend that you regularly backup Your Content and Data that you store on the Services or store using Third-Party Apps and Services.”
  Read Microsoft’s Services Agreement

  This means Microsoft itself acknowledges that data stored in their cloud is not fully covered by their own backups for all risk types.

• In Microsoft’s “Shared responsibility in the cloud” documentation, they explain that while Microsoft handles much of the infrastructure (security, physical, network), customers are responsible for their data, identities, and access.
  Learn more on Microsoft Learn

Google

• On Google Cloud’s “Backup and Disaster Recovery Solutions” page, Google presents their first party Backup and DR tools for cloud workloads, but also explicitly includes partner and third party solutions as part of the ecosystem. Google expects and supports customers using other tools beyond what Google itself offers.
  Explore Google Cloud Backup and DR

• Guides about Google Workspace note that while Google maintains infrastructure resilience and redundancy, customer data loss due to user error, malicious deletion, insider threats, or malware/ransomware is not always covered by Google’s native tools or policies. The responsibility for protecting and recovering data in those scenarios lies with you (the organization).

What Native Tools and Built-In Protections Do, and Their Limitations

It’s not that Google or Microsoft do nothing. Many built-in protections are good, especially for infrastructure, availability, and redundancy. But they typically do not give you full protection in all scenarios:

What Microsoft and Google Themselves Recommend

• Microsoft explicitly recommends that you regularly back up your content and data stored in their services or via third party apps.
  Read Microsoft’s Services Agreement

• Google’s documentation about Google Cloud Backup and DR describes partner backup tools in addition to Google’s own backups, and advises customers to design their own backup and recovery strategy to meet their specific recovery point and recovery time objectives.

Risks of Not Having a Dedicated Backup Strategy

Here are scenarios that happen more often than people think:

1. User error or accidental deletion: An employee deletes important files, trash is emptied, file versions are lost.

2. Malicious deletion or insider threat: Someone with access deletes or changes data maliciously.

3. Ransomware or malware: A compromised account causes data corruption, encryption, or destruction.

4. Retention policy gaps or regulatory compliance: Native retention may not meet legal or audit requirements.

5. Provider outages or service incidents: Even major cloud providers can have outages or lose access to content.

6. Data lifecycle issues: When employees leave or data moves between accounts, historic data can be lost.

What a Good Third Party Backup Covers

To mitigate the risks, a third party backup solution should provide:

• Granular restores (single file, email, folder, mailbox, shared drive, etc.)

• Versioning over long time periods

• Point in time recovery

• Immutable backups or protections from deletion and ransomware

• Storage separated from the production environment

• Strong security: encryption at rest and in transit, access controls

• Clear service level agreements for recovery time and recovery point objectives

• Compliance and audit readiness (metadata preservation, logs, etc.)

How This Fits Into Our Managed IT Service Plans

Because of all of the above:

• We include third party cloud backup with all our managed IT service plans to ensure clients are protected, not just relying on what Google or Microsoft provide.

• We configure backups based on the client’s business needs: how often, how far back, and what services (email, shared drives, Teams, OneDrive, etc.) are included.

• We ensure the backups are safe, isolated, immutable, and that restores are tested.

• We monitor backups to ensure success, receive alerts if failures occur, and conduct periodic audits.

Conclusion

Using cloud services like Google or Microsoft adds many resilience advantages over older on-prem setups: infrastructure, redundancy, and availability. But it does not make you invincible. The cloud provider’s responsibilities do not cover every scenario of data risk.

Assuming “we don’t need backups” because data is in the cloud exposes your business to lost data, downtime, regulatory gaps, and sometimes permanent losses.