Bulletproof CRM: How Rubrik Safeguards Your Dynamics 365 Investment

While Microsoft provides a robust platform in Dynamics 365, a dangerous protection gap leaves your mission-critical CRM data vulnerable to deletion, corruption, and ransomware. This gap has the potential to cripple customer relationships and revenue operations with recovery options that range from limited to non-existent.

Rubrik closes this critical gap with the industry's only relationship-aware protection solution for Dynamics 365. The solution preserves your data and the complex interconnections that make it valuable, all while simplifying compliance and eliminating recovery complexity.

The question isn't whether you can afford such protection-it's whether you can afford to operate without it.

Rubrik Security Cloud for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Data Protection

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a suite of intelligent business applications that power mission-critical operations across sales, marketing, customer service, and field operations. While Microsoft ensures platform availability, businesses themselves remain responsible for protecting their valuable CRM data.

As a result, organizations that rely on Dynamics 365 face several critical protection challenges:

• Accidental Deletions: Admin errors can wipe out critical business records. Native tools don't offer reliable restores.

• Integration Failures: Power Automate and third-party app issues can corrupt data across systems.

• Compliance & Retention: Meeting GDPR, HIPAA, and SOX retention requirements is complex with native tooling.

• Cybersecurity Risk: External access and automation errors increase the risk of malicious or accidental data loss.

So, how do you implement a comprehensive data protection strategy that protects the integrity of Dynamics 365 as it becomes increasingly central to business operations?

What is Rubrik Data Protection for Dynamics 365?

Rubrik Data Protection for Dynamics 365 is designed specifically to address these challenges, simplifying backup and recovery while enhancing security and compliance to ensure business continuity for your critical CRM environment.

Rubrik offers:

• Effortless, Policy-Driven Automation: Streamline protection with automated backup schedules and retention policies aligned to your business and regulatory requirements.

• Granular, Relationship-Aware Recovery: Restore individual records, tables, and metadata while preserving critical parent-child relationships to maintain data integrity.

• Immutable, Air-Gapped Backups: Defend against ransomware and accidental deletions with backups that cannot be altered or deleted once created.

• Unified Microsoft Ecosystem Protection: Manage both Dynamics 365 CRM and Microsoft 365 data protection from a single interface within Rubrik Security Cloud.

Having examined the core business benefits of Rubrik's Dynamics 365 protection solution, let's dive into the technical architecture that underpins these capabilities and learn how these components collaborate to protect your CRM environment from data loss scenarios.

Anatomy of Rubrik's SaaS-based protection solution for Microsoft Dynamics 365

Rubrik Dynamics 365 Data Protection is a Rubrik-hosted and Rubrik-managed SaaS offering and consists of three key architectural components:

Rubrik Security Cloud (RSC) is a SaaS platform managed by Rubrik that serves as the central control hub for backup operations. It organizes and executes these operations based on predefined SLA Domains, which specify the frequency of backups and how long data will be retained. The control plane is responsible for orchestrating tasks, managing policies, and monitoring backup and recovery jobs. This comprehensive management ensures data security and compliance throughout the entire backup and recovery process.

Rubrik Hosted Storage is located within Rubrik's Azure subscription and functions as a SaaS Data Plane, providing the necessary compute and storage resources for data protection tasks, such as backup, restore, and data processing tasks. Backup data is stored in SQL-based databases, ensuring that it is readily available for recovery operations. The infrastructure is designed for high availability and fault tolerance, offering reliable data protection and recovery solutions.

Customer Dynamics 365 Environment is where all the Dynamics data and metadata are stored, requiring backup and restoration. Using Rubrik for protection ensures seamless data safeguarding for both data and metadata. It features automated backup retention policies and enables quick recovery by comparing snapshots with live environments, eliminating any guesswork.

This architecture simplifies the backup and recovery of Dynamics objects and metadata, providing air-gapped and immutable backups and reliable recovery options to meet enterprise requirements.

How can Rubrik Security Cloud protect your Dynamics data?

Let's take a quick tour of Rubrik Security Cloud in action to see how it can reduce your risk of data loss and help ensure business continuity.

• Step 1: Dynamics 365 environment onboarding
  The onboarding process for Rubrik's Dynamics 365 protection is straightforward and security-focused. It begins when Rubrik Security Cloud prompts the Administrator to authorize access to the Dynamics 365 environment. The Administrator then authenticates using the admin credentials and establishes the secure connection between Rubrik Security Cloud and Dynamics 365, after which Dynamics 365 issues an access token to Rubrik Security Cloud. This token enables Rubrik to access Dynamics 365 resources through the API without storing credentials. Importantly, Dynamics 365 credentials are never saved within Rubrik Security Cloud and are completely purged from memory immediately after configuring OAuth, enhancing security.

• Step 2: Global SLA Policy & Backup
  After successful authentication, Rubrik Security Cloud scans the Dynamics 365 organization hierarchy, relationships, and data/metadata to ensure that API resources are available for data export. The SLA policy is applied at the environment level, meaning that administrators cannot exclude any data or metadata from being protected.
  
  To initiate the backup process, both the Dynamics 365 data and metadata are ingested into the segmented customer tenant environment hosted by Rubrik. Here, Rubrik Security Cloud organizes the data and metadata and writes them into a SQL based database. The first backup is a full backup. For subsequent backups, Rubrik compares the current dataset to the previous one and identifies any changes since the last backup. This changed data is then backed up and saved as an incremental forever backup. Additionally, Rubrik-generated metadata (separate from the Dynamics 365 metadata) is uploaded to Rubrik Security Cloud to facilitate search and browsing capabilities.
  

• Step 3: Compare with live environment and recover Dynamics data after an incident
  The administrator initiates the recovery workflow from Rubrik Security Cloud by defining the recovery task, which can involve either recovering data or metadata, and selecting the recovery snapshot. The recovery wizard provides a user-friendly visual breakdown of changes between snapshots or between a snapshot and the live environment while also offering insights into the cascading impacts of potential recovery operations. For example, in a table recovery, Rubrik can illustrate parent-child relationships up to 10 levels deep. Once the administrator confirms the recovery operation, data and all relationships and dependencies are restored based on the selected parent-child relationships.

Safeguarding Your Business-Critical CRM Data

As organizations increasingly rely on Dynamics 365 to drive essential business operations, comprehensive data protection becomes a technical necessity and a strategic imperative. Rubrik's purpose-built solution addresses the unique challenges of CRM data protection by combining automated policy management, relationship-aware recovery, and immutable backups within a unified Microsoft ecosystem protection strategy.

The technical architecture explored in the blog demonstrates how Rubrik's innovative approach translates into tangible business outcomes: reduced administrative overhead, minimized data loss, enhanced compliance capabilities, and robust protection against both accidental deletion and malicious threats.

Ready to experience Rubrik's Dynamics 365 protection firsthand? Access the Rubrik Protection for Microsoft Dynamics hands-on lab to get started!