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  1. Home
  3. Cohesity Alta SaaS Protection Administrator's Guide
  5. Protect Exchange Online data
  7. Setting up Exchange Online data protection with Cohesity Alta SaaS Protection
Cohesity Alta SaaS Protection Administrator's Guide

Setting up Exchange Online data protection with Cohesity Alta SaaS Protection

To protect user's data in your Exchange Online environment using Cohesity Alta SaaS Protection, you need to add and set up a Cohesity Alta SaaS Protection Exchange connector based on your backup requirements.

Before you begin:

You must consider the following points before adding a connector.

  • Ensure that all prerequisites are completed.

    See Pre-requisites to setup protection for M365.

  • The following items are supported for backup and restore:

    • Mailboxes

      • User mailboxes

      • Group mailboxes

      • Teams mailboxes

    • Public Folders

    • Archive mailboxes

    • Shared mailboxes

    • Contacts and calendars

    • Tasks and notes

    • Mailbox Rules

    • Junk Email and Deleted Items: Junk email and deleted items folders to restore accidentally deleted or wrongly categorized emails.

    • Soft deleted mailboxes: This option can be configured using Connector service.

    • Recoverable items folder: An option to back up the Recoverable Items folder, which stores items recoverable after deletion.

    • Archived mailboxes: An option to back up archived mailboxes, ensuring that all user data, including archived content, is backed up.

    • Public folders: An option to back up Public folders.

    • Groups created using the Role assigned and Dynamic users options.

  • Other considerations:

    The emails in the EWS environment are backed as .eml files. Cohesity Alta SaaS Protection receives these .eml files from Exchange, containing the original email as an encrypted attachment and a message body indicating that the email is encrypted. To view these .eml files, they must be downloaded/restored from Cohesity Alta SaaS Protection and opened in Outlook by a user with the necessary permissions.

  • Connector features:

    • Flexible mailbox backup options

      Back up all user mailboxes or selectively back up specific mailboxes (granular backup) based on backup requirements.

    • Rolling Mailbox Scope to distribute the backup load across jobs.

    • Alphabetical Mailbox Scope to back up mailboxes based on alphabetical name ranges.

    • Back up mailboxes belonging to specific email domains.

    • Back up all or selected Microsoft 365 Group and Teams mailboxes.

    • Back up Public folders in the Exchange Online environment.

Note:

The emails in the EWS environment are backed as .eml files. Cohesity Alta SaaS Protection receives these .eml files from Exchange, containing the original email as an encrypted attachment and a message body indicating that the email is encrypted. To view these .eml files, they must be downloaded/restored from Cohesity Alta SaaS Protection and opened in Outlook by a user with the necessary permissions.

Video tutorial to add an Exchange Online connector:

To add an Exchange connector, follow the procedure outlined on this page or watch the video tutorial below:

Default Chromeless Player

Step-by-step procedure to add an Exchange Online connector:
  1. Access the Administration portal.

    The home page of the Administration portal is displayed.

  2. Click Connectors on the Backup card.
  3. Click New backup connector.
  4. Click Exchange.

    To make the setup process easier and more intuitive, each tab in the connector creation workflow includes a help icon (?) at the left. You can click this icon to open the respective help topic for that tab, which can guide you through the setup step by step.

  5. On the General tab, set up the basic configuration for the connector and click Next.

    See Configure General settings.

  6. On the Configure scope tab, configure the capture scope to define which data to be protected and click Next.

    See Configure capture scope for Exchange connectors.

  7. On the Credentials page, configure credentials to access the source workloads (the SharePoint data to be backed up) and click Next.

    See Configure credentials.

  8. On the Policy configuration tab, configure the appropriate backup policy for more granular backup needs.

    See Configure Custom backup policy and guidelines.

  9. On the Scheduling tab, schedule when the backup job should run.

    See Schedule a backup.

  10. On the Email notifications tab, configure email addresses to receive notifications about backup activities.

    See Configure email addresses to get notifications.

  11. On the Review tab, save the settings and initiate the backup.

    See Review configuration and edit/save/initiate backup.

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