There's a belief that quietly puts a lot of small businesses at risk, and it sounds completely reasonable: "Our email and files are in the cloud with Microsoft, so they're backed up. That's Microsoft's job now."
It isn't. And the day you find that out the hard way is a day you'll really wish someone had told you sooner. So here it is.
What Microsoft 365 and Google Actually Promise
Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are brilliant at one thing: keeping their service running. If a hard drive dies in their data center, your data is safe, because they store it in several places at once. Their job is to make sure the service is there when you log in.
But that's not the same as backing up your data. If you delete something, the system does exactly what you told it to: it deletes it. If an employee wipes a shared folder, if a hacked account starts erasing emails, if someone leaves and their mailbox gets cleared out, the cloud faithfully carries out the deletion. There's no separate copy sitting safely in a corner, because keeping one was never part of the deal.
The providers even say this themselves, in their own terms. They look after the platform. Looking after your actual content is on you. Most people just never read that far.
How this bites real businesses
This isn't a theoretical risk. It plays out in ordinary, everyday ways:
- The honest mistake. Someone deletes the wrong folder and nobody notices for a couple of months, long past the short window where it could've been recovered.
- The angry exit. An employee leaves on bad terms and clears out their mailbox and files on the way. Without your own backup, a lot of that is simply gone.
- The hacked account. An attacker gets into one account and starts deleting things to cover their tracks. The cloud treats it as legitimate, because the login was real.
- Ransomware that syncs. Files get encrypted on a laptop, and the sync tool helpfully pushes those encrypted versions straight up to the cloud, overwriting the good ones.
In every one of these, "it's in the cloud" offers no protection at all. The cloud did its job perfectly. The problem is that its job was never to save you from this.
The Fix: Backing Up Your Cloud Data
The fix is refreshingly simple, and it doesn't mean abandoning Microsoft or Google. You keep using them. You just add a real backup on top:
- Get a dedicated backup for your cloud accounts. There are affordable services built specifically to back up Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace (your email, files, contacts, calendars) into a separate copy you control. This is the core fix.
- Make sure that copy lives somewhere else. The whole point is a backup that's independent of the account it's protecting, so a problem in one can't reach into the other.
- Test that you can get things back. Same rule as always: a backup you've never restored from is just a hopeful guess. Try pulling back a file or two and confirm it actually works.
Moving to the cloud genuinely takes a lot of worries off your plate, but it doesn't make your data someone else's responsibility. Microsoft and Google keep the lights on. Keeping a recoverable copy of your own work is still down to you, and it's a small, cheap thing to set up today. It's only devastating to be missing on the day you actually need it.
Book a 15-minute security check.
No sales pitch, no strings. Just a straight look at your risk profile and the one thing worth fixing first.