Your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace Account Is Not as Safe as You Think

Let’s start with a question that most small business owners have never actually asked themselves: if you lost access to your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace account tomorrow — everything in it, gone — what would happen to your business?

Take a second and really think about it. Your email history. Your contacts. Your shared drives full of contracts, proposals, and client files. Your spreadsheets, your presentations, your team’s entire collaboration history. For most small and mid-sized businesses, one of these two platforms has quietly become the backbone of daily operations. Everything lives there.

Now here’s the part that catches people off guard: neither Microsoft nor Google is responsible for protecting that data the way you probably assume they are.

If that makes you uncomfortable, good. It should. Because understanding this gap — and doing something about it — might be one of the most important decisions you make for your business this year.

The Shared Responsibility Model Nobody Told You About

Both Microsoft and Google operate under something called a “shared responsibility model.” In plain English, that means they’re responsible for keeping their platforms running — the infrastructure, the uptime, the physical security of their data centers. What they are not responsible for is your data.

Read that again, because it’s the part that trips up almost every business owner we talk to.

Microsoft says it plainly in their service agreement. Google does too. They recommend that customers maintain independent backups of their data. But nobody reads service agreements, and neither company goes out of its way to make this point obvious during the sales process. So most businesses sign up, start using the platform, and assume that because their data is “in the cloud,” it’s automatically safe and backed up.

It’s not. And the consequences of learning this lesson the hard way can be devastating.

What Could Actually Go Wrong?

When people hear “data loss,” they tend to picture some dramatic hacking scenario. And yes, that’s one possibility. But the more common causes are a lot more mundane — and that’s what makes them so dangerous.

An employee accidentally deletes a shared folder full of critical project files. Someone’s account gets compromised through a phishing attack and the attacker wipes the mailbox clean. A disgruntled team member on their way out the door permanently deletes months of work. A misconfigured retention policy quietly purges emails older than 30 days that you assumed were being kept forever. A sync error corrupts files across multiple users’ drives before anyone notices.

These things happen constantly. And here’s where the real gut punch lands: Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace both have retention and recovery windows, but they’re limited. Once those windows close — and we’re often talking about 30 to 90 days depending on the service and your licensing tier — that data is gone. Permanently.

If the only copy of your business data exists within that same platform, you’re one bad day away from a scenario that could genuinely put you out of business.

Why Relying on the Provider’s Own Backups Is a Gamble You Can’t Afford

There’s a common misconception that “it’s in the cloud, so it’s backed up.” And in a very narrow, technical sense, Microsoft and Google do maintain redundant copies of your data across their infrastructure. But that redundancy exists to protect against their hardware failures — not to protect you from accidental deletion, malicious insiders, ransomware, or account-level compromises.

Think about it this way. If someone gains access to your admin account and deletes user mailboxes, that deletion gets replicated across Microsoft’s or Google’s infrastructure just as faithfully as any other change. The system is working exactly as designed. It just isn’t designed to be your safety net.

And if your account gets suspended or terminated for any reason — a billing dispute, a terms of service issue, or even an error on the provider’s end — your access to that data could be cut off entirely. If your only backup lives inside the same ecosystem that just locked you out, you’ve got nothing.

This is why every reputable IT security framework — from NIST to ISO 27001 to the guidelines published by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — emphasizes the same principle: never keep your only backup with the same provider that hosts your primary data. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a fundamental best practice, and it exists for exactly the scenarios we’re talking about.

Securing Your Environment: The Basics That Too Many Businesses Skip

Beyond the backup question, there’s a broader issue that deserves attention: most small business Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace environments are running with their default security settings, which is a lot like leaving your office door unlocked because it came that way from the builder.

These platforms offer powerful security features, but many of them aren’t turned on out of the box, and configuring them properly requires more than a casual understanding of the admin console. Here are some of the areas where we see businesses falling short most often.

Multi-factor authentication. This is table stakes in 2026, yet we still encounter businesses that haven’t enabled MFA across all user accounts. If your team is logging into email with just a username and password, you’re making it far too easy for an attacker to walk right in. Every account — especially admin accounts — needs MFA enabled. No exceptions.

Admin account management. Speaking of admin accounts, how many people in your organization have full administrative access to your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace environment? If the answer is more than two or three, that’s a problem. Admin credentials are the keys to the kingdom, and the fewer people who hold them, the smaller your attack surface. Those accounts should also have separate, dedicated credentials — not the same login someone uses for their daily email.

Email security and anti-phishing. Both platforms offer built-in protections against phishing, spoofing, and malware, but the default settings are often set to their least aggressive levels. Tightening these controls — implementing DMARC, DKIM, and SPF records, enabling advanced threat protection, configuring safe links and attachment scanning — can dramatically reduce the volume of malicious email that reaches your team’s inboxes.

Access controls and permissions. Who can share files externally? Who can create guest accounts? Who can install third-party apps and integrations? If you haven’t explicitly defined and restricted these permissions, the answer is probably “everyone,” which means your data could be leaving your organization in ways you’ve never considered.

Audit logging and monitoring. Both Microsoft and Google provide audit logs that track who’s doing what inside your environment. But if nobody’s actually reviewing those logs — or better yet, feeding them into a monitoring system that flags suspicious activity — they’re not doing you any good. Knowing that something happened three months after the fact isn’t much better than not knowing at all.

Device and endpoint management. Your team is accessing company data from laptops, phones, tablets, and home computers. Do you have policies controlling which devices can access your environment? Can you remotely wipe company data from a lost or stolen phone? If an employee leaves, can you ensure they no longer have access to anything from their personal devices? These are questions that need clear answers.

What Industry Standards Actually Call For

If you’re wondering what “good” looks like, there are well-established frameworks that lay out exactly what businesses should be doing to secure cloud-based productivity environments. You don’t need to become an expert in these frameworks yourself, but you should know they exist and make sure whoever is managing your IT is following them.

The Center for Internet Security publishes specific benchmarks for both Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace that detail recommended security configurations. These benchmarks are considered the gold standard for baseline security and cover everything from authentication policies to data sharing controls to audit settings.

NIST — the National Institute of Standards and Technology — provides broader cybersecurity frameworks that apply directly to how businesses should manage cloud services, including backup requirements, access controls, and incident response planning.

The key takeaway from all of these frameworks is consistent: default settings are not sufficient, backups must be independent of your primary platform, access should follow the principle of least privilege, and monitoring should be continuous rather than reactive.

If your current IT setup hasn’t been measured against these standards, you’ve got a blind spot that needs attention.

What You Should Actually Do About All of This

If you’ve made it this far and you’re feeling a little uneasy, that’s a perfectly reasonable reaction. The good news is that none of this is unsolvable. But it does require deliberate action, and it requires the right expertise.

Here’s a practical starting point. First, get a third-party backup solution in place for your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace environment. This should be a completely independent service that stores copies of your email, files, and collaboration data outside of Microsoft’s or Google’s ecosystem. There are reputable providers that specialize in exactly this, and the cost is modest compared to the alternative of losing everything.

Second, get a security assessment of your current environment. Have someone who knows what they’re doing review your configurations against CIS benchmarks and industry best practices. Identify the gaps and prioritize fixing them based on risk.

Third — and this is where we come back to a theme from our previous article — make sure you have the right managed services partner in place. A good MSP will handle the ongoing monitoring, maintenance, and security management of your cloud environment so that you’re not relying on someone to remember to check the audit logs or hoping that your retention policies are set correctly.

How NST Holdings Can Help

At NST Holdings, this is exactly the kind of challenge we help small and mid-sized business owners navigate. As a CIO advisory firm, we bring the strategic technology perspective that most small businesses don’t have in-house. We’re not selling you backup software or an MSP contract — we’re helping you understand what your business actually needs and then finding the right partners and solutions to deliver it.

Whether you need help evaluating your current Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace security posture, selecting a third-party backup provider, or finding an MSP that can properly manage and protect your cloud environment, we’re here to guide you through the process. We handle the research, the vetting, the negotiations, and the transition planning so you can focus on what you do best — running your business.

If any of this resonated with you, don’t wait for a crisis to force your hand. Reach out to us at www.NSTHoldings.com and let’s have a straightforward conversation about where you stand and what it’ll take to get you where you need to be.

NST Holdings is a Tampa-based CIO advisory firm specializing in helping small and mid-sized businesses navigate IT strategy, MSP partner selection, contract negotiation, and technology transitions. Learn more at www.NSTHoldings.com.