Are you unsure about how to manage your Microsoft 365 data retention, archiving, and backup? In this guide, we’ll break down these crucial data management strategies to help you protect your data, ensure compliance, and optimize your storage in Microsoft 365. By the end of this article, you’ll understand the key differences between these strategies and how to apply them effectively.
What are Retention, Archive, and Backup in Microsoft 365?
Retention, archive, and backup are three essential strategies for managing your organization’s data. While they are often confused, they serve different purposes, and understanding their unique roles is critical for ensuring compliance and protecting your data.
In this section, we’ll explore each of these strategies in detail, including how they work together to ensure your data is available when you need it and compliant with regulations.
What is Retention?
Retention and records management is the practice of managing the retention and deletion of your organisation’s data to meet legal, regulatory, and business needs. You can apply retention policies to different types of data in Microsoft 365, such as emails, documents, and chat messages. In addition, you can use policies to control the lifecycle of your data by deleting data when it is no longer required.
What is Data Retention in Microsoft 365?
Retention is the practice of managing the lifecycle of your organization’s data to meet legal, regulatory, and business needs. It involves defining how long data should be kept and when it should be deleted.
You can apply retention policies in Microsoft 365 to various types of data, including emails, documents, and chat messages. Retention helps you ensure that your data is preserved for the required period and that unneeded data is deleted to reduce risks and optimize storage.
Retention and Records Management Examples
Here are a few scenarios where retention is essential:
- Legal and Compliance:
Use a retention policy to keep all emails in all user mailboxes for seven years and then delete. - Contract Management:
Use record labels to keep contracts for 10 years after the contract ends, followed by a review for deletion. - Employee Data:
Use a retention policy to retain critical Team and SharePoint site data for one year, then release the retention. - Risk Minimization:
Delete all chat messages after three months to comply with your company’s data retention policy.
Retention Benefits
- Compliance: Ensures that you comply with legal, regulatory, and business requirements.
- Data Security: Helps protect your data from accidental deletion or corruption.
- Cost Savings: Reduces storage costs by removing unnecessary data.
- Lifecycle Management: Efficiently manage your data by controlling its lifecycle and reducing clutter.
- Risk Management: Mitigates risks related to data loss or corruption
How Archiving Helps Long-term Data Management
Archiving involves moving data that is no longer actively used to a separate storage location. This allows you to preserve long-term or historical data that may not be frequently accessed but still holds value.
Archiving is especially useful for meeting compliance needs and preserving data for reference or audit purposes.
Archiving Examples
Consider archiving when:
- Historical Data:
Archive project teams that were closed more than two years ago for 10 years. - Permanent Records:
Preserve all records related to building or plant construction indefinitely. - Inactive Data:
Archive Teams or sites that haven’t been accessed in the last year to free up SharePoint space.
Archiving Benefits
- Cost Optimization: Frees up space on primary storage by moving data to cold storage, reducing operational costs.
- Compliance: Ensures long-term retention of inactive data to meet regulatory requirements.
- Preservation: Helps you keep historical or reference data for auditing or legal purposes.
What is Backup and Why is it Essential?
Backup involves creating immutable copies of your data stored in a separate location. This ensures that you can quickly restore your data in case of data loss, corruption, or ransomware attacks. Backups are a key component of business continuity and disaster recovery.
Backup Examples
Use backups for critical data such as:
- SharePoint Sites:
Backup critical SharePoint sites used for business operations and retain backups for five years. - Mailboxes:
Backup user mailboxes and retain backup copies for one year.
Backup Benefits
- Data Recovery: Quickly recover from accidental deletion, corruption, or ransomware attacks.
- Business Continuity: Ensure that your essential business data is available even during disruptions.
- Compliance: Meet regulatory requirements for data recovery and protection.
- Peace of Mind: Create an immutable copy of your data to safeguard against disasters.
Retention, Archive, and Backup: Key Differences Explained
Here’s a quick comparison of the key features, benefits, and challenges of each strategy:
| Purpose | Retention | Archiving | Backup |
|---|---|---|---|
| Purpose | 🎯Retain the content that you need to keep, and delete the content that you don’t. | 🎯Preserve historical & inactive data | 🎯Immutable copy of your current data that is kept for disaster recovery in case of data loss or corruption. |
| Use | ⚙️Retain necessary data and delete unnecessary data for compliance. It is not designed to protect data from cybersecurity attacks. | ⚙️Preserve historical or inactive data for long-term storage. | ⚙️Ensure disaster recovery by creating an immutable copy of data. |
| Storage Location | 💽Hidden copies of data retained in Microsoft 365 | 💽Data moved to cold storage (e.g., Microsoft 365 Archive, Azure etc). | 💽Immutable copy stored separately for recovery ( e.g. Microsoft 365 Backup, third party back up services) |
| Benefits | ✅Compliance with regulations. ✅Data lifecycle management. ✅Cost savings. | ✅Reduced operational costs. ✅Compliance with long-term data retention. | ✅Fast recovery after data loss. ✅Business continuity. ✅Peace of mind. |
| Challenges | ⚠️Defining retention policies. ⚠️Consistency across the organization. ⚠️Consumes SharePoint storage space ⚠️Automated labelling required E5 information protection and Governance licencing. | ⚠️Applying consistent archive policies. ⚠️Accessibility of archived data. ⚠️Searchability of archived data. | ⚠️Investment in third-party solutions. ⚠️Restore speeds can be slow. ⚠️Searchability of backedup data. |
| Risks | 🚨Accidental loss of necessary data if the retention rules are not defined 🚨Retention takes priority over deletion so it can impact the right to be forgotten. 🚨Does not protect against corruption | 🚨Increased storage costs if unnecessary data is archived. 🚨Limited functionality compared to primary storage. | 🚨 Does not protect against legal compliance issues. 🚨 Complex data restoration processes. |
How does Microsoft Support retention, archive and backup
Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management and Records Management
Microsoft Purview offers retention policies for various data types, including email, documents, chat messages, etc. These policies allow organisations to determine if data should be retained, deleted after a specific period, or retained and then deleted.
Retention policies
Retention policies can be applied to the entire organisation or specific locations. Additionally, retention labels can be applied manually applied to individual items. Default and auto labelling options are available with the E5 Information Protection & Governance license.
Microsoft Records Management
Microsoft records management is a feature that helps organisations manage their data lifecycle, compliance, and legal obligations. It allows users to apply retention labels to documents, emails, and other items, and automatically delete or preserve them based on predefined policies. Records management also provides tools to review and dispose of records that are no longer needed or have reached their end of life.
ℹ️ Microsoft records management is an advanced feature that requires E5 Compliance or E5 Information Protection and Governance
Microsoft reference documentation: Learn about Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management | Microsoft Learn
Archive mailboxes
Microsoft 365’s archiving feature, also known as In-Place Archiving, offers users additional storage space for their online mailboxes. When a user’s archive mailbox is enabled, they gain access to an extra 100 GB of storage. If a user requires more than 100 GB, they can activate auto-expanding archiving, which provides up to 1.5 TB of extra storage in archive mailboxes. Though the primary mailbox and archive mailbox are separate, they are both connected to a single user.
Microsoft reference documentation: Learn about archive mailboxes for Microsoft Purview | Microsoft Learn
Data Archiving in Microsoft 365
Data archiving in Microsoft 365 provides a solution for inactive or ageing SharePoint sites to be moved to Azure for long-term ‘cold’ storage. This is a more cost-effective approach, which helps in freeing up your SharePoint ‘hot’ storage for active data. Additionally, it offers search and discovery functionality along with data security and compliance controls. This feature allows organisations to archive or reactivate sites in place without migrating data outside of the Microsoft ecosystem. Reactivated data retains all original permissions, labels, and metadata.
Microsoft reference documentation: Welcome to Microsoft Inspire 2023: Introducing Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive – Microsoft Community Hub
Microsoft 365 Backup
Microsoft 365 Backup enables organisations to securely backup and restore their OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange Online data. It offers fast backup and restore speeds and provides a restore SLA. Moreover, it comes equipped with advanced search and filter capabilities, allowing users to easily locate content in backups using metadata.
In the unfortunate event of a ransomware attack, Microsoft 365 Backup helps you restore your data to a healthy point in time, ensuring that your company’s content can be recovered exactly as it was before the attack. This feature helps keep your data safe and secure, giving you peace of mind knowing that your organisation’s critical information is protected.
Microsoft reference documentation: Welcome to Microsoft Inspire 2023: Introducing Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive – Microsoft Community Hub
Can Microsoft Purview Retention Policies Replace Backup or Archive?
While Microsoft Purview Retention policies are essential for managing data retention and compliance, they do not replace backup or archive solutions.
- Backup creates immutable copies of data to ensure business continuity and disaster recovery.
- Retention policies help you manage the lifecycle of data and ensure compliance with regulations. However, they don’t create separate copies of your data for recovery purposes.
- Archiving is used for long-term storage of inactive data, and it frees up space in your primary storage.
Conclusion
Data is the backbone of any organization, and safeguarding it is essential to keep your business running smoothly. Retention, archive, and backup tools empower you to protect your data, ensure compliance, and optimize storage costs. By leveraging them together, you can ensure your data is secure, accessible, and recoverable when needed.
Implementing the right strategies will give you peace of mind and enable your organization to focus on its core objectives, knowing that your data management needs are in good hands.
Next Steps
Ready to implement retention, archive, and backup strategies in your Microsoft 365 environment? Contact me for expert guidance.