Archivado, autoexpansión, Retención y Litigation Hold para los buzones de Exchange Online
During my participation in an archiving implementation project for Exchange Online mailboxes, it was somewhat difficult to understand how some essential aspects such as Retention and Litigation Hold worked together internally. So today, I would like to share with you some of my schemes and conclusions.
It is important and essential to understand the correct functioning of all the elements involved in order to guarantee correct management of email and related elements or data, design and implement appropriate archiving scenarios or/and strategies taking into account the optimization of system performance and the productivity of users, and above all, when defining an appropriate government, not only in the terms indicated above but also in terms of legal compliance and information conservation.
1. Archiving for Exchange Online mailboxes: is a feature that allows any organization to more efficiently manage data overload in email mailboxes. It is about having another separate and parallel store where old and less relevant messages are moved. Separating it from the main mailbox optimizes the mailbox's performance and capacity, while facilitating and improving access to historical data. This is like the law of divide and conquer that I like so much.
By default, and at least today, the time is set to two years, but we can configure it to the time that is considered most appropriate in each case, and by having different OWA policies we can have different configurations for different groups of users or scenarios that let's define
2. Self-expansion: Suppose our main mailbox stores information for a year, and everything older than a year goes to the archive mailbox. But this archive mailbox will grow. If an administrator does not have to be aware of this growth, but can automatically assign more size little by little, don't you think we would facilitate the task of both administration and unblocked access to users? You know what happens when the mailboxes are full, right?
So we can configure auto-expansion for archiving by allowing automatic expansion of the size of archive mailboxes as needed and adapting to the continuous growth of archived data, without requiring manual intervention by Exchange administrators, or we can set a procedure to administrators to do it manually. I personally find this a very useful feature in environments where users generate large amounts of email data and other types of messages on a regular basis, as we ensure that users do not experience interruptions or access blocks when a storage fills up, no one You must ensure that users have continuous access to their stored data without worrying about space limitations.
But be careful, I do not consider applying it without control to be a solution, it is important to keep in mind that auto-expansion must be configured appropriately to ensure that file growth remains within reasonable limits and does not cause performance or consumption problems excessive resources in the Exchange Online environment.
Another point to remember is that even configuring auto-expansion, and not all mailboxes, it is advisable to have procedures that help us check daily if there are mailboxes that may be reaching the limit of their storage, and take measures in these cases as best as possible. proactive as we can.
3. Retention in Exchange Online: It is an extremely important component that we often forget, as it helps us retain and clean email messages and other types of data for specific periods of time, ensuring that relevant information is available in case of that was necessary or, on the contrary, that the mailboxes be cleaned.
That is, suppose we have a mailbox with archiving and auto-expansion, after one year the items go to the archive mailbox, but after 10 years, no one deletes them, or only those users who bother to read a storage exceeded warning message, It can take 20 years or more... a retention policy will allow us to establish an action that saves all the content for 5 years, and after these 5 years delete and clean it.
This component helps us satisfy compliance with our organization's internal and external policies, as well as regulatory and legal requirements.
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Retention can be implemented at the organization level, at the mailbox level, or through retention labels, in which case they would be applied to individual messages or folders. It is hard work to carefully define these policies, and as we have mentioned, legal requirements, commercial relevance and risk management must be taken into account. And although a policy on all mailboxes in a specific scenario deletes elements after 5 years, we can have elements marked with retention labels that keep them for a longer defined time, but maintaining some specific elements is not the same as maintaining all of them. There are many possibilities, it is just a matter of knowing our needs and given the possibilities that the tool offers us, finding the most appropriate configuration, it sounds easy, and it is, although it requires dedication of time.
4. Litigation Hold in Exchange Online: or legal hold, it is an essential feature to preserve data in the event of litigation, investigation or audit, so when Litigation Hold is activated on a mailbox, all messages are retained, including those that users intentionally deleted. And then I wonder, what is the difference with respect to the “normal” Retention that we explained before? This can only be applied to specific mailboxes, from the console or from Powershell, but cannot be applied by policy, at least at the moment. This would ensure the integrity of the data in the mailboxes that have Litigation Hold activated, avoiding the loss or alteration of information relevant to any legal process or internal investigation. So we can have a general 5-year retention period for the organization, but some mailboxes will have a 10-year Litigation Hold period for legal reasons.
As you can see, understanding or understanding how Archiving works for Exchange Online mailboxes, with its auto-expansion or not, Retention and Litigation Hold is essential for effective email management. Below I will share some graphics that may help you understand it a little better...
Check which plans Exchange Online Archiving is available for:
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