Most owners I talk to think "it's in the cloud" means "it's backed up." Those are two different things, and the gap between them has a deadline on it.
Microsoft replicates your data so a hardware failure never takes you down. That's resilience. It is not protection from your own team. When someone deletes a client folder, that's a valid instruction and the system carries it out.
The recovery clocks are real, and shorter than most people guess. A deleted SharePoint site stays restorable for 93 days, then it's permanently gone. When you offboard an employee, their OneDrive is kept for 30 days after the account is removed — that's the default, and most firms never change it. Miss the window and there's nobody to escalate to.
That's the real cloud-versus-on-premises comparison. On-prem, your backup was a box you bought and could point at. In Microsoft 365 it's a retention window you either extended on purpose or you didn't.
Microsoft sells its own backup service now — pay-as-you-go, $0.15 per GiB per month, with recovery windows up to ten years for SharePoint and OneDrive. Measure that against what a week of rebuilding client workpapers costs a CPA firm in billable hours.
Worth knowing your actual windows before your next cyber renewal.
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