17 posts tagged with "microsoft 365"

Over the last few months it’s been amazing sharing Corso with more and more users. One pleasant surprise has been users who are operating in large, often multi-tenant deployments of Microsoft 365 who want to use Corso to back up all their data. In our discussions on the Corso User Discord, we’ve found some best practices for backing up large Exchange mailboxes with Corso.

We all know that Corso is a free and open-source tool for creating backups of your Microsoft 365 data. But where does that data go?

Corso creates a repository to store your backups, and the default in our documentation is to send that data to AWS S3. It's possible however to back up to any object storage system that has an S3-compatible API. Let’s talk about some options.

It’s 10:00 in the morning, and you need coffee and a snack. You know you’re supposed to back up the company’s Microsoft 365 instance, but it takes so long! Surely a quick break won’t matter.

Wrong! While you were in the break room, your organization was hit with a malware attack that wiped out many critical files and spreadsheets in minutes. Now your cell phone’s ringing off the hook. Slapping your forehead with the palm of your hand, you shout, “If only backups were faster and easier!”

Rackspace is having a rough few days.

The story thus far​

Rackspace Technology announced on December 7th that, six days after suffering a ransomware attack, they're still unable to determine when normal email service will be restored to the thousands of hosted Microsoft Exchange customers. They asked for customers' patience and provided temporary email fixes as they continue to investigate the attack that began late last week and has caused ongoing disruptions.

Service interruptions started on December 5th with no end in sight.

When trying to set up a Microsoft 365 sandbox domain myself I found some of the documentation out of date, so this is a quick guide to setting up a sandbox domain for Microsoft 365 development.

Why would you want to do this?​

I personally needed this for recording a screencast of the process to install Corso. While recording myself going through permission settings in M365, I didn’t want to unintentionally reveal PII for my team members or other sensitive data.

Another reason to do this is if you’re looking to level up both your skills and want to experiment with being the admin in your own space rather than impacting other users on a production domain. It’s also a good step to experiment with owning your own identity.

I recently saw a tweet, shown below, that really spoke to me. Gian was really addressing the chaotic situation with Twitter, but it feels much more broadly applicable in today’s climate. Given the increased role of automation in flagging “bad” accounts, there is now an ever-growing list of examples where imperfect AI-based systems misclassify perfectly legitimate accounts as bad. With no human-based recourse with most large companies, this has led to disastrous situations where email account suspensions lead to lost accessing to other services that you have used your entire life (due to SSO via your email account), AdWords account suspensions lead to a small business unable to advertise, or a flagged application account leads to published applications being automatically withdrawn from app stores.

Have you had it with Google sheets? Me too! Excel is my home. It’s where I write all my best formulae. And what about PowerPoint? The way it just finds stock photos for you? The automatic ‘alternative designs for this slide’ button? It’s too good. I can’t give up Microsoft 365.

If you did some work today, there’s a good chance you opened a Microsoft tool. M365 is used by more than a million companies worldwide, and nearly 880,000 companies in the U.S. use the software suite. But with that widespread usage comes risk, business-critical data is at risk of loss or corruption, if not securely backed up and protected.