Microsoft 365 underpins key workloads for most organizations, and the high cost of outages and data loss have dramatically increased the importance of data protection tools such as backup. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery of Microsoft 365 introduces particular considerations and challenges that organizations must keep in mind as they evaluate data protection offerings. This buyer’s guide discusses key capabilities for customers to consider when evaluating backup offerings, and looks at how evolution of the SaaS market could influence hybrid and multicloud infrastructure decisions in the near future. The mean cost of outages has risen steadily from $1.56 million in 2022 to $2.33 million in this most recent study. About 47% of outages cost more than $1 million, up from 36% in the 2023 iteration of this study. Outages lead to numerous consequences, including lost worker productivity, data loss, lost revenue and lost customer loyalty. Security incidents including ransomware have been a top cause of outages