As businesses increasingly move workloads to the cloud, more organizations are realizing the importance of protecting cloud data. In fact, according to Infrascale, 76% of MSPs in the U.S. now focus on backing up cloud applications for their clients. Among these, Microsoft 365 remains the most common service customers rely on MSPs to protect.
Today, most MSPs have already deployed established Microsoft 365 backup solutions for their clients. These solutions generally cover the basics, yet often lack the depth MSPs need and come with higher overall costs. It’s time to rethink whether your current Microsoft 365 backup is truly helping you protect better and earn smarter.
Key Microsoft 365 Backup capabilities
Most Microsoft 365 backup solutions cover the same fundamental features—protecting Exchange, OneDrive, and SharePoint data—as well as providing basic recovery options such as restores to the same or different accounts, with granular or self-service options.
While these features cover the basics data protection, MSPs often overlook several crucial capabilities that directly impact service quality, security resilience, and compliance.
1. Support for Microsoft Teams 1:1 chat backup
In the digital workplace era, Microsoft Teams has become the hub for daily communication, collaboration, and decision-making. Protecting its data—especially private 1-on-1 chats—is crucial, as these records often serve as digital evidence during internal audits, investigations, or legal proceedings. Since Teams messages can be edited or deleted by users and Microsoft 365 retains data only for a limited time, reliable backups are essential to ensure the authenticity of your data.
Some vendors claim to support Teams backup but only safeguard channel content or rely on additional settings for using Microsoft’s Graph API.
2. Cyber-Resilient features
Immutability is a must—it protects backup data from being altered or deleted. However, MSPs should ensure their solution provides built-in immutability, as any configuration gaps caused by poor integration can expose data to accidental deletion. For example, without an automated retention lock, backups may be unlocked before the retention period ends.
Besides immutability, many organizations overlook the importance of air-gapped protection. Together, these two layers form a dual defense for data resilience: immutability ensures data integrity and air-gap adds the final layer—so even if access is compromised, data stays untouchable and is always recoverable.
3. Unified vendor
Relying on multiple vendors often creates significant operational overhead. During procurement, MSPs must perform compatibility checks between hardware and software, while deployment can involve complex multi-vendor configurations that slow down onboarding. As the client base grows—and each customer uses different combinations of backup tools and hardware—management becomes even more time-consuming.
This fragmented environment not only increases IT training costs, but also complicates troubleshooting, forcing engineers to coordinate with multiple vendors when problems occur.
4. Preferred data location
According to a survey from MSP Success, 73% of MSPs reported a rise in client demand for compliance services, making compliance readiness essential for winning and retaining customers. Among the most common requirements is data residency—keeping data within specific regions as mandated by regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA, and other local laws.
For MSPs serving global clients, control over where backups are stored is essential for compliance. However, some vendors offer only limited data center options, restricting MSPs’ ability to be compliant.
ActiveProtect empowers MSPs across four key areas
Here’s how MSPs can compete and meet customer needs with Synology ActiveProtect—a purpose-built, all-in-one backup appliance—empowers MSPs to deliver stronger, more efficient services.
1. Comprehensive backups for Teams 1:1 chat
ActiveProtect supports backing up Teams 1-on-1 chats without additional settings, including chat members, messages, stickers, and embedded OneDrive links that stay clickable for easy reference.
During restore, full-text search helps users quickly locate specific messages across all chats, with an option to filter by time range. Selected messages or entire chats can then be exported as HTML files for easy review and compliance.
2. Cyber resilience
ActiveProtect offers native WORM technology. Once data is backed up to the appliance, the system instantly locks it to ensure it can’t be changed or deleted. It also integrates an automated air-gap mechanism that isolates backup servers from the network for enhanced security.
Click here to learn more about ActiveProtect’s air-gapping capabilities
3. Unified vendor
ActiveProtect is a purpose-built backup appliance that combines pre-configured hardware and optimized software in one platform, with an intuitive web interface and guided setup that make it easy for anyone to get started. This integrated design ensures consistent performance, faster deployment, and easier maintenance.
4. Preferred data location
ActiveProtect allows MSPs to choose where data is stored by deploying appliances across regions. It works seamlessly with Microsoft 365 Multi-Geo, automatically detecting each user’s data region and ensuring backups are stored in the right local server.
The following table shows key factors for MSPs to consider when choosing a Microsoft 365 backup solution, helping you compare top market options:
Save 5× on costs with ActiveProtect’s pricing model
Most Microsoft 365 backup solutions in the market follow a per-user subscription model, but this model can lead to certain inefficiencies. For example, even if some accounts are inactive or have low usage, MSPs still have to pay the same monthly license fee, month after month, making the cost disproportionately high.
ActiveProtect takes a different approach. Its pricing is not based on user count; instead, you only pay for the appliance itself, while software licenses are required only when managing more than 3 backup servers in the same cluster.
Click here to see how ActiveProtect simplifies Microsoft 365 data protection.
In addition, ActiveProtect comes with no hidden fees. A common hidden cost in Microsoft 365 backups involves storage capacity limits per account. Some providers claim storage is included, but still impose per-account storage caps, charging extra once those limits are exceeded. ActiveProtect eliminates these costs entirely, giving MSPs full pricing transparency.
Based on our real cases, protecting around 3,000 Microsoft 365 accounts with ActiveProtect can cut costs by up to 5× compared to typical per-user SaaS backup solutions.
Click here to find out more about Synology ActiveProtect.