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retention policies

Why Does Automating Your Retention Policies Make Sense?

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The short answer: Time, Money, & Trouble. 

Governance in Office 365 was a hot topic at a conference I recently attended. I was pleased about how much time was spent talking about it. It means it’s important and there’s a need.  

By now, everyone knows about GDPR. It applies to companies in Europe, and those that do business with people and companies in Europe, but increasingly there are GDPR-like and GDPR-inspired regulations coming to play here in the US. While there isn’t a federal data protection law that protects all consumers, certain industries have them, and recently, some state governments have begun to implement these regulations as well. For example, the banking, financial, health, and insurance sectors all have compliance requirements when it comes to retaining, storing, and disposing of records.  

But how do large companies manage their data to stay in compliance, while not overwhelming resources and staff?  

The truth is you can’t rely on users to manually set retention policies.  It’s just not realistic. It takes too much time, failing to delete unnecessary records costs money, and manual retention setting risks human error and potential litigation. This is where automation steps in. 

Data retention not only addresses legal requirements but enables companies to eliminate excess data. Having a set policy that automatically categorizes data helps an organization hold onto valuable information while purging records that have little importance or value – without manually archiving or deleting. This practice of having policies in place to automatically set retention policies based on certain characteristics or events (someone leaving the company, for example) ensures that the appropriate records are retained and saves money by clearing out those that are simply taking up space. Having data automatically set to delete based on a compliance schedule also reduces the risk of litigation and eliminates the need to migrate unnecessary records. 

The reality is that there are data protection laws for, no surprise, our protection. And truthfully, they are simply supporting retention policies – the rules established for retaining and disposing of an organization’s records. Setting up your records classification to update automatically according to the predetermined settings in your retention policies helps you stay in compliance with these ever-changing laws, and saves time, money, and maybe most importantly, trouble. 

Introducing Archive Accelerator Policy Manager

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Introducing Archive Accelerator Policy Manager

Having helped countless enterprises deploy Enterprise Vault, I can tell you that when first deployed, almost no enterprise has a document retention policy defined. Unfortunately, this means they go with the defaults, which is ‘keep everything forever’ and doesn’t bode well down the road. 

In recent years, many organizations have finally gotten around to putting proper retention policies in place, or at least have started to define processes to do that. 

These policies can be as simple as changing the default policy to 6 or 7 years, instead of forever, but others get more complicated.  Some other examples are: 

  • For mailbox archiving, set everything in certain folders to n years, but put the default at a much lower number.  This encourages users to file things they need to keep longer. 
  • For Journal archives, use different retention policies based on who the person is, or even what department or country that are in.  For example, keep data for VIP users longer than normal.   

Once defined, actually setting the policy can be a challenge.  How do you identify all message in a journal sent by members of a particular group? 

Also, how do you handle overlapping policies for an item in a journal?  For example, one message is sent to 3 people who work in different groups or countries, and may therefore have different retention requirements.  Which policy do you choose to set? 

We’ve talked to other companies, large and small, about these issues, and believe we’ve come up solution that is flexible enough to fit most, if not all, cases. 

We start with the Archive Accelerator Catalog, which we’ve done several blog posts about already. You can read about it’s introduction, how relevant the Catalog is in everyday use, and how the Catalog can save time and money when it comes to data migration. 

When we showed the Catalog to various customers and partners, especially with the Power BI reports that take advantage of its speed, the question always came up… “Great, now that you’ve found the exact 20,354 messages that meet my criteria (in less than a second), what can I do about it?  Can I change the retention, for example?” 

With the newly released ‘Archive Accelerator Policy Manager’, we are finally making that possible! 

You can now manage your archived data to meet new compliance and government regulations, business rules, and more. Policy Manager gives you flexibility in building searches based on metadata, allows you to implement new retention rules on previously archived data, remove data that should no longer be retained, and provides sub-second speed and responsiveness when filtering the data to be processed.  

With these capabilities at your fingertips, just imagine how Policy Manager can make managing your data easier and more seamless! 

How to Map Enterprise Vault Retention Policies to Microsoft 365 Exchange Retention Policies

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You’re facing the task of moving your on-premises email from Veritas Enterprise Vault™ to Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365).  Now you’re wondering how to implement retention policies in Microsoft 365 similar to Enterprise Vault. How will these policies transfer? Is it even possible? How do I make sure our policies are exactly what we need and that all these messages have the correct retention policies in Microsoft 365? 

Veritas Enterprise Vault™ policies consist of retention categories, retention plans, storage expiry, and legal holds.  Microsoft 365 mailbox policies are defined by retention tags and retention policies. Retention tags define the name, type, retention period, and retention activity. The retention policy consists of a retention tag or multiple retention tags. It is this policy that is associated with a mailbox or group of mailboxes that defines the retention. A mailbox can have only one retention policy associated with it. 

The Enterprise Vault retention and mailbox policies can be mapped to Microsoft 365 retention policies, and then these retention policies are applied to the mailboxes. The policies and tags can be found in Exchange admin center | compliance management. 

Microsoft has some excellent information on this process, but in a simple outline, these are the steps you need to take before migrating your mailboxes to Microsoft 365. Keep in mind that if these steps are done post migration of the mailboxes, the default retention and deletion policies of Microsoft 365 will take effect:  

  • Create new retention tags for the archive and deletion policies 
  • Create a new retention policy or multiple retention policies 
  • Assign a retention policy to user mailboxes 
  • If you choose to do so, make one of the newly created retention policies the default for your organization. 

To illustrate, let’s look at an example from our fictitious company named the Contoso Corporation. 

The current retention and mailbox policies applied to the CONTOSOEV1 Enterprise Vault mailbox archives are… 

  • CONTOSOEV1 Enterprise Vault
    • Mailbox Policy: Archive messages older than 3 months
    • Shortcut Deletion Policy:  Delete shortcuts after 2 years 
    • Retention Policy: Keep items 10 years 

Keep in mind that the Enterprise Vault Mailbox Policy above, defines messages are to be archived when they become older than 3 months. This is typical for the purpose of saving space on on-premise Exchange Servers. If enabled, Enterprise Vault will create a shortcut for the archived item in the user’s mailbox. So, the user still has access to the item in the archive directly from the mailbox.  There is also an optional policy in Enterprise Vault for how long to hold onto Shortcuts. This is set at Contoso for 2 years. This is typicallydone to manage the total number of items in a mailbox. 

In this example, we’ll create new Contoso retention tags and policies in Microsoft 365. Additional retention tags can be added to the policies as required. 

  • CONTOSO
    • retention policy: Contoso Retention Policy 
      • retention tags:
        • Contoso 2 year move to archive
        • Contoso 10 year delete  

Since there are generous mailbox quotes in Exchange Online (typically 100 GB as of this writing), there is no need to archive an item after 3 months. Instead, we’ll keep them in the mailbox, but set up a policy to move messages to the Archive mailbox after 2 years, which is how long users are used to having mail remain in their mailbox. 

Next, we’ll apply the Contoso Retention Policy to Microsoft 365 mailboxes. This policy includes the two new tags… 

  • Move to archive: Defines the time period a message can remain in a mailbox before being moved to theuser’s In-Place archive. 
  • Delete: Delete after 10 years. 

Now, when users are migrated to Microsoft 365, they should have a similar experience to that which they had with Enterprise Vault Mailbox archiving.  The fewer changes, the better! 

Have you migrated from Enterprise Vault to Microsoft 365? If you haven’t mapped your retention policies and you’re looking for some guidance, check out the link above, or give us a call. We’re happy to help!