Team Chat Backup is changing - and it will cost you

Recently Microsoft announced some changes to the way vendors can access Microsoft Teams chat data, for the purpose of backups. From a technical perspective, what is changing is that to backup Teams Chat Data we now must use the new Microsoft Teams Protected API to be able to programmatically access the Teams Chat data for backup purpose. It is important to note that at this stage, this only affects Teams Chat, not any file or other data that is stored within the Team environment. There are no guarantees that this wont change over time, we suggest future changes may be dictated by how the market receives this change and what the feedback to Microsoft is.

If you are looking to understand more fully from a technical perspective, our resident Veeam and API expert Ben Young (Veeam Vanguard and winner of the much coveted vBridge Cross for extreme bravery on the IT battle ground) has published a blog on his personal blog site explaining the change. This blog can be found here: Changes to Microsoft Teams API's are on the way and your backups will now cost you (chat only...for now) (benyoung.blog)

What this means from a practical perspective for business's that are currently backing up their Microsoft Teams chat data in your regular backup regimen, is that you now have to access this data through the new API, the process for requesting this is included in Ben’s blog above. The implication for you as a Microsoft client, is that the new Teams chat API is Metered by Microsoft. What this means is, that Microsoft will now charge the end client for transactions through the API, essentially meaning that every message that is backed up will incur a transaction charge.

The obvious question that people are asking is, ‘how much the additional cost will be for my business’? As is often the case when attempting to work out Microsoft transaction or egress charging, the answer is not a simple one, but essentially the busier your Microsoft Teams Chat environment is, the more you will be charged, as the charging is calculated per message. Ben has attempted to summarise the charging schedule below, but as you can see, unless you can accurately work out how many messages are currently going through your Teams chat environment, it is going to be very hard to estimate what the costs will look like until we actually implement the new backup methodology. Essentially the more messages your team sends, the more it will cost you to back them up.

Microsoft do have some basic reporting available via the Teams Admin dashboard if you wish to estimate your monthly charge for using the API. You can follow the steps here to generate a report for the last 90 days to see what the average usage of messages in your tenancy is. As a rough guide we estimate it is approximately NZ$1 per 850 messages.

Microsoft have no de-duplication in this service, in essence every time a message is sent, every member of the group/team/chat stores a copy, and you are charged for each message to be backed up.

The high-level charging schedule is summarised below:

Person to person (1:1) chat
These are messages sent from one user directly to another in a one-on-one chat. You can use the following equation.

((# of messages) * 2) * 0.00075$USD

Group Chat (1:many) or Teams meeting chat
Lets use the scenario below where we are in a Team’s meeting with 100 people.

For every message sent here, including silly memes, emojis, short comments like "lol" this means 100 copies of the message are stored and backed up. You can see how this could very quickly add up. you would use the below equation for group messages

((# of messages) * (# of chat/call members) * 0.00075$USD

Teams Channel Chat
This differs from the above model, where a message is sent within a Teams Channel it is stored differently and every message is only backed up once. So, the equation is still a bit more palatable, but still not insignificant across a large organisation.

(# of messages) * 0.00075$USD

Essentially the question for you, as a current consumer of M365 Teams Chat Backup is, ‘do you want to continue to backup your Teams Chat?’ If the answer is yes, you do want these backed up due to this being a HR requirement or important company data is being shared over the teams chat function, then you will need to kick off the process with Microsoft to gain access for your tenant to the new API To initiate this, please follow the instructions in Ben’s blog referenced above. You will then need to repoint your backup software to the new API.

As simple as that!