Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities providing collaboration, portals, enterprise search, content management, business forms and integration, and business intelligence. Now that it has become a focal point for business communications and collaboration, it's more important than ever to protect your SharePoint environment from downtime and data loss.

However, protecting SharePoint from downtime can be difficult because of its complex implementation architecture. SharePoint implementations follow a three-tier architectural model with a front-end Web server based on Internet Information Services (IIS), a middle-tier application server based on SharePoint Server roles, and a back-end database server based on SQL Server. SQL Server is the relational database used for storing all content, data, and configuration information used by Office SharePoint Server 2007. Protecting SharePoint requires protecting each of the three architectural tiers.

This whitepaper will discuss the need to protect all three tiers of SharePoint's implementation architecture.