Microsoft runs your Azure tenant. We run your recovery plan.
Mindtime keeps immutable, sovereign copies of your Azure workloads in European, ISO 27001-certified facilities — under European law, outside the Microsoft perimeter. If your tenant, admin account or region becomes unavailable, your backups don't go with them.
Azure Backup is a great feature. It isn't an independent recovery strategy.
Azure Backup, Recovery Services Vaults and geo-redundant storage all live inside the same Microsoft control plane you're trying to protect against. That's the whole problem.
Entra ID is the single point of failure
Compromise a Global Admin, lose a tenant, trigger a lockout — and the Recovery Services Vault holding your backups is compromised or inaccessible in exactly the same moment.
Microsoft is a US company
Your data may sit in West Europe or Germany West Central, but Microsoft remains subject to the US CLOUD Act. Data residency is not data sovereignty.
M365, Entra and Azure overlap — and leave gaps
Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Entra ID configuration — each has different native retention rules, and none of them are a backup. Until something is deleted, and it's gone.
A second, sovereign copy — operated outside the Microsoft estate.
Azure Backup is excellent for operational recovery. Mindtime is the independent copy regulators and boards increasingly require: different jurisdiction, different operator, different identity plane.
| Capability | Azure Backup (native) | Mindtime Sovereign Backup |
|---|---|---|
| Legal jurisdiction | US (CLOUD Act applies) | EU only — contract, operator and storage |
| Identity plane | Microsoft Entra ID | Independent identity, decoupled from Entra |
| Storage location | Azure Recovery Services Vaults | EU-owned data centres, outside Azure |
| Immutability | Soft delete & immutable vaults | WORM-enforced, air-gapped by default |
| Encryption keys | Microsoft-managed or CMK in Azure Key Vault | Customer-held or EU-HSM keys |
| Workload scope | Azure VMs, SQL, Files, workloads in VMs | Azure + Microsoft 365 + Entra ID config |
| Compliance posture | ISO, SOC, FedRAMP (Microsoft) | ISO 27001 / 27017 / 27018 + GDPR-native |
| Works with Azure Backup | — | Yes — we complement it, we don't replace it |
Azure, Microsoft 365, and the identity tier beneath them.
The Microsoft stack is deeply interconnected. Protect only part of it, and your recovery will fail at exactly the wrong moment.
Azure infrastructure
Azure VMs, managed disks, Azure Files and Blob, Azure SQL, SQL MI, PostgreSQL / MySQL Flexible Server, Cosmos DB, AKS persistent volumes.
Microsoft 365 data
Exchange Online mailboxes, SharePoint sites, OneDrive for Business, Teams chats, channels and files — with item-level restore.
Entra ID & configuration
Users, groups, roles, conditional access policies, application registrations — so you can rebuild a tenant, not just files.
Three steps to a sovereign recovery plane.
No self-service tenant and a wish of luck. Every deployment is scoped to your RPO, RTO and regulator.
Consultation & scoping
A 45-minute call covering your Azure tenant, Microsoft 365 footprint, RTO/RPO targets and the regulators you answer to (DORA, NIS2, BaFin, AFM, etc.).
Architecture & deployment
We design the sovereign vault, set immutable policies, and deploy with least-privilege Azure AD app registrations and Graph-API scopes.
Verified recoveries
Quarterly restore drills, signed reports for your auditors, and a named European engineer on your account — not a ticket queue.
Built for European regulators. Answerable to European law.
Every layer of the service — contract, operator, data centre, encryption key — is inside the EU and outside US jurisdiction.
ISO/IEC 27001
Information security management system, audited annually.
ISO/IEC 27017
Cloud-specific security controls for multi-tenant environments.
ISO/IEC 27018
Protection of personally identifiable information in public cloud.
GDPR & EU Data Act
Lawful basis, DPA, transfer-impact assessments — handled.
DORA-ready
Operational-resilience evidence for financial entities under DORA.
NIS2-ready
Incident response and supply-chain obligations for essential entities.
EU-only operations
EU legal entity, EU staff, EU sub-processors. No US parent.
Customer-held keys
BYOK or EU-HSM. Your data is cryptographically yours.
The questions your CISO will ask first.
Talk to a European backup architect.
A 45-minute consultation call. We'll map your Azure & M365 estate, your obligations and your realistic recovery posture — and tell you honestly whether sovereign backup is right for you.
Book a consultation callFor your business to run smoothly,
your data needs to lead the way.
Read our latest e-book on M365 backup
Why Backing Up Microsoft 365 Data in Europe Is More Important Than Ever.
Book a meeting
Choose a time that fits your schedule and connect with a Mindtime Data Security expert to learn how to achieve data resiliency.
