As more organizations steer away from legacy on-prem file shares and move towards cloud-based storage solutions, disaster recovery methods need to evolve in order to protect cloud data. Spanning provides data protection and backup for Office 365, G Suite, and Salesforce. Spanning makes it possible to perform rapid restores from backups to keep one’s business operational in case of human error, illegitimate deletion, malicious insiders, hackers, malware/ransomware, and more.

Spanning offers a free 14-day trial to test their features in your own test or production environments. In this review, we’ll go over the Spanning setup process for O365 and G Suite and then work through example use cases in test environments.

Prerequisites

1. Office 365 or G Suite tenant
2. Global/Super administrator account for O365 or G Suite 
3. Spanning Backup for Office 365 or G Suite subscription/trial 

O365 Installation 

1. First, log into portal.office.com with a global administrator account.
2. Then, log into your Spanning trial instance and navigate to https://o365.spanningbackup.com/authorize to authorize Spanning access to your O365 tenant.
   
3. After accepting, the next screen will ask where you would like your data to be stored. In this example, I chose United States as the location. Note that this cannot be changed in the future.

   

4. Then, you need to choose to manage the encryption keys within Spanning or outside of Spanning. Select the option that aligns with the compliance policies set within your organization. In this example, I chose to self-managed the encryption keys with AWS and entered my AWS account information. With this option, you get full control over your Spanning backups, decreasing risk of account compromises. Note that this cannot be changed in the future.

   

5. If you chose the AWS option for encryption keys, head over to your AWS console. Then hover over Services from the header and search for Key Management Service. Under the Customer managed keys section create a new key for the Spanning integration.
   
6. The next page you can add an alias and description to clearly state the purpose of the key.
   
   
7. Next add any tags if needed, then click next. If needed define key administrative permissions, in this use case I left it with the default settings.
   
   
8. Then you’ll need to add Spanning’s Amazon account as an external account on the key permissions, review the key policy, and then click on finish to generate the key. Then copy the key’s full ARN value and paste it into the Spanning configuration process (Step 4).
   
9. Once completed, the Spanning portal for O365 appears. Here one can manage users, SharePoint sites, view activity audit logs, backup history, and more!
   

G Suite Installation 

1.  First, log into your G Suite account and navigate to the G Suite Marketplace and search for Spanning Backup. Then click on the install button.
   
   
2. Then click on continue on the Domain wide install prompt. This led to an Almost there page. Fill it out with your information to start the trial.
    
   
3. Once completed, a tutorial will pop up. Read through the instructions and click on continue.
   
4. Backups are run on a schedule, but one can force a backup at any moment and can specify what exactly to back up.
   
   
5. Without Spanning, if a user accidently or maliciously deletes data to the trash bin and then permanently deletes it from the trash bin, it most likely is no longer recoverable.
   
   
6. However, with Spanning it can show us backups, history, and audit logs. In my setup, we can see Spanning pull in files from my G Suite account. We can restore files that have been deleted through Spanning’s admin panel. The data gets restored in an auto generated restore folder in one’s My Drive.