What is a Microsoft 365 retention policy?

A Microsoft 365 retention policy is a set of rules and settings that govern how long data is retained and when it should be deleted within an organization's Microsoft 365 environment.

Microsoft 365 retention policies (often called Office 365 retention policies) are vital for managing content lifecycle across various Microsoft 365 services, such as Exchange Online (emails), SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams.

Retention policies help organizations comply with legal, regulatory, and business requirements by ensuring that critical information is preserved for a specified period while unnecessary data is disposed of after its usefulness has ended.

They help you:

  • Comply with industry regulations and various internal policies dealing with the requirements to keep content for a minimum period.
  • Reduce your risk of litigation or security breaches by permanently deleting old content.
  • Improve collaboration inside your organization by ensuring your users are working with up-to-date and relevant content.
  1. Retention and deletion: You can configure a retention policy to retain content for a specific period, regardless of user actions, and ensure that important information isn’t deleted prematurely. Once the retention period expires, you can set it up so that once the retention period expires, the content is automatically deleted or kept indefinitely until manually removed.
  2. Scoping and application: You can apply Microsoft 365 retention policies to specific locations (such as mailboxes, SharePoint sites, or Teams channels), user groups, or organization-wide – it all depends on your organization’s needs and strategies.
  3. Label-based retention: In addition to overarching retention policies, you can use retention labels to classify and manage individual items (such as documents or emails) with specific retention settings. Users can apply these labels manually or it can be done automatically based on conditions like content type or keywords.
  4. Immutable records: When a retention policy is applied, it can prevent users from deleting content until the retention period ends. This feature is very important for compliance, as it ensures that data is preserved in an unalterable state for legal or auditing purposes.
  5. Disposition review: This is useful for content that requires manual review before deletion. A retention policy can trigger a disposition process. This process allows authorized users to review and decide whether the content should be permanently deleted or retained further.

In summary, a Microsoft 365 retention policy is a vital tool for managing data retention and deletion within an organization’s Microsoft 365 environment. They help you ensure that data is retained according to your business needs and regulatory requirements, while also helping you to reduce storage costs by automating the deletion of unnecessary content.

Related Posts