In the cloud is not the same as backed up.

No, and Microsoft says so. Their shared responsibility model makes them responsible for keeping the service running and you responsible for your data. What you get instead is retention: a 93 day recycle bin in SharePoint and OneDrive, and a mailbox that is permanently deleted 30 days after its licence is removed. Both are safety nets for somebody deleting the wrong file and noticing the same week. Neither is a backup, and neither will put a business back.

Included. Daily cloud server backups and daily Microsoft 365 backups are two separate lines in the standard managed agreement, at the published price. They are not a premium tier and they are not sold to you after something goes wrong, which is the point at which most people are first offered them.

Very little that your staff will notice. Same accounts, same addresses, same apps. What changes is underneath: multi factor turned on properly across every account, permissions made deliberate rather than inherited, licensing matched to what people actually use, and a backup of the tenancy added, because there almost certainly is not one.

Sometimes, and it depends on what the server does, what your internet is like at the busiest hour of your day, and what the licensing costs once it is up there. Some workloads are cheaper and safer in the cloud, some are slower and dearer, and a few should not move at all. We will tell you which of those yours is, including when the answer is to leave it where it is.

We contain it first, work out what was reached and how far back a clean copy has to come from, then restore in sequence and check it before anyone works in it. The reason that is possible is that the backup is held separately from the live data, so encrypting your files does not encrypt the copy. If it turns out to be a notifiable data breach under the Privacy Act 1988 we will tell you plainly and help you work through what the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme requires.

Seven years. That is the retention on the cloud copy, and it is well past the five years Australian tax record keeping rules ask for, so a request to produce something old is a lookup rather than a problem. The practical limit is how long you have been with us: two years in, you have two years of history. What matters more than the ceiling is the first week, and that is the part that gets restored and timed rather than assumed.

In Australia. It does not leave the country, and it is not quietly replicated to somewhere cheaper offshore, which is worth asking anybody else you are comparing us against because plenty do and very few volunteer it.

Yes, and for larger environments it is worth it. A local copy restores a big file server far faster than pulling it back over your internet connection, so it is about the speed of the recovery rather than the safety of the data. It sits alongside the cloud copy rather than replacing it, because a copy in the same building as the original is not a backup on the day the building is the problem. We will tell you honestly whether your environment is big enough to benefit.

Yes. Migrations are project work rather than day to day support, so they are scoped and quoted before anything starts, at the published rate. You will know what it costs and roughly how long your people will be affected before you agree to it, rather than afterwards.