Don’t worry things are straightforward with Microsoft’s retention principles. Each of those policies can have different retention actions and different retention periods. In most cases, the same content will have several policies applied simultaneously. In everyday use in your organization, you are most likely to have multiple retention policies in place. Retain and then delete: Retain the content for a specified period and then permanently delete it.įor more detailed information about retention policies and retention labels, please look at this Microsoft document.Delete-only: Permanently delete content after a specified period.Retain-only: Retain content forever or for a specified period.Using these two actions, we can configure retention settings for the following scenarios: Share knowledge effectively inside the organization and be more agile by ensuring that your users work only with current and relevant content.Īs you have already noticed, data retention sums up to only two actions:.Reduce your risk of litigation or a security breach by permanently deleting old content.Comply proactively with industry regulations and internal policies that require you to keep content for a minimum period.Retention policies are a Microsoft 365 compliance feature that can be used to govern information vital for your organization.
MICROSOFT OFFICE 365 SUBSCRIPTION RETURN POLICY ARCHIVE
Also, you’d want to archive all the contracts with critical financial data and define who has access to those documents. You’d want to define a rule to delete all those office supply receipts automatically after the retention period has passed. We can all agree that you won’t treat all those files the same way, nor give access to them to anyone. So, you need to keep all your client contracts, data, and other financial records, as well as all the receipts for office supplies, papers, coffee, etc. You can be obliged by the government to keep all financial records for five years. Let’s take a look at financial records, for example. There can be many discrepancies in retaining different data, for how long, and what to do with it after the retention period has passed. Whether it be emails, documents, contracts, etc., data retention is often a tricky subject. Why Do We Need Office 365 Data Retention?Įach organization can have several reasons that will require them to retain certain data for a specific time. You can learn more about protection history and sensitivity labels in one of our previous posts or explore Office 365 data governance in a comprehensive eBook. It has been a long way from Office 365 labels, originally developed as retention labels, to Azure Information Protection labels, now commonly used for content access control. Both are applied to resources using label policies.
In Microsoft 365, we use retention and sensitivity labels to define who has access to what content and how long we need to keep it.
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