Spanning Blog

Welcome to our blog featuring thought leadership and best practices on SaaS backup and recovery, data protection and security, and regular product updates for Spanning Backup for Office 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: Your Organization’s Safety Plan

From hurricanes, errant employees, malware to even a rodent with an appetite for cables — the likelihood of an organization suffering data loss has never been greater. An organization’s best defense is to plan for business continuity and disaster recovery by using processes that guide organizations to possibly prevent and/or better manage an (unpredictable) disruptive event.


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Office 365 Data Protection: Part 2 – Litigation Hold

In Part 1 of this two-part series, we discussed how you need to rely on more than the default retention times for Office 365 to fully protect your data from accidental deletion. In Part 2, we’ll discuss if Exchange Online Litigation Hold and In-Place Hold are good-enough data protection solutions for Office 365, or if your organization may need something purpose-built for Office 365 backup and restore.


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5 Steps to Take Now to Reduce Data Loss Risk When Employees Leave

The most common scenario risk of human-based data loss is when employees leave an organization, either willingly or unwillingly. And that is cause for concern for an IT manager or system administrator. Here are the 5 steps to take now to reduce the risk of data loss when an employee leaves.


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Why Microsoft Requiring Multi-Factor Authentication for Privileged Accounts is a Good Thing

On June 22, 2018, Microsoft announced a public preview of a new security policy which will enable multi-factor authentication (or MFA) for Azure Active Directory “privileged accounts” (or administrator accounts), including most Office 365 admin accounts. After the preview, they will automatically opt these accounts into the policy by default, adding a much needed layer of security to these accounts. Spanning Backup for Office 365’s Sr. Product Manager Andy Rouse explains why this is a good thing in his newest blog post.


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What State and Local Governments Need to Know About Risks in Google Workspace and Office 365

Software as a Service (SaaS) collaborative platform adoption is increasing among state and local government — but along with increased adoption comes added risk. In this blog, you’ll learn how to reduce the risks from ransomware and malicious insiders if you’ve adopted Office 365 or Google Workspace. You’ll also learn more about: Why SaaS collaboration […]


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3 Options for Restoring Lost Data in Google Workspace

With Google’s recently announced Data Loss Prevention feature, you may think your Google Workspace domain is safe enough, but you’d be wrong. Their Data Loss prevention will protect Google Workspace Unlimited customers in rule-based ways, but can do nothing to protect customers from sync errors, or errors where admins or users accidentally delete critical email.


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Backing Up and Recovering Salesforce Data

In this blog, we share our Salesforce “how to” videos that show you a better way to restore lost data in use cases like the following: Recovering faster from a Salesforce mass data disaster, such as errors that massively overwrite good data with bad. Populating Salesforce Sandboxes faster, while masking sensitive data in the process [...]

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The Global Impact of GDPR

The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is fast-approaching with less than a year remaining for data controllers and processors to comply.  Non-compliance could result in legal action or large fines (up to 4 percent of an organization’s global turnover or €20 Million). As the deadline looms, companies around the globe who interact in any […]


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What Yesterday’s Gmail Attack Taught Us

Data Protection is a shared responsibility. The Internet was all abuzz yesterday when a sophisticated Gmail phishing attack hit.  The rogue email, often appearing to be sent from one of your contacts, masqueraded as a Google Docs sharing request, but in actuality was a link that requests the user to grant access to an application [...]

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Best Practices for Lowering Cyber Insurance Costs and Cyber Risk

If your cyber insurance vendor offers discounts for companies who meet high data security and protection standards, they will likely focus on these processes and controls. With cybersecurity threats on the rise, companies are increasingly taking advantage of cybersecurity insurance. And while cyber insurance can be worth it, it’ll cost you. Last year, U.S. insurers […]


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