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Exchange 365 vs Exchange Servers

I came from a company on I believe Outlook 2010 running and managing an exchange server and using tape backups to keep everything for years and years and years (yay retention policies!). My current company is using Office 365 and Exchange with that (not local). I'm not the email/server admin in the prior or current company but I want to get a feel for the differences between managing your own exchange server and using 365 and the cloud. I do have a voice in policy creation and since we're looking to clean up a lot of IT, I'm trying to be as informed as possible to make better choices for the compnay moving forward.

Old company ~800 employees

Current company ~ 150 employees

The recent event to bring this up is a user was making archives of his emails and saving them off to a secondary (local) drive. They were stored by jobs so he could find information easier, but saving them to an archive (and saving them locally) removes them from exchange. If you couldn't predict it already, the drive was lost and everything is gone because he believed his own backups on his own drive was better than the network drives which have more redundancy. They weren't deleted so they aren't recoverable under the default 14 day recovery period in exchange 365. So what I want to do is examine what changes could we make and how can we better implement data retention regarding emails.

My immediate guess is running a local exchange server would be a great cost for such a small company, especially when that would also entail the backups and storing said information after the fact. With 365, how could we implement a plan to save all emails for a set time, say 5 years. Are there additional costs that would be incurred for eating up so much space or is there a separate program that covers this for all users. I believe the Microsoft Rep I spoke to last week said there's a feature that can be enabled for the person in question, but this would be something I'd like to push company wide to better cover data retention. This would probably also include employees who are no longer with the company so their account would have to be there for the duration of the retention time right? Does this increase the number of licenses needed to keep those accounts available?

Hello,

With Office 365, Exchange Online, you can keep your emails forever without backups on local hard drives. My recommendation is that you use Exchange Online Plan 2, this plan allows you to have an unlimited online archiving. Using retention policies you can meet your goals. Review the links below.


https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/exc...

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn7...(v=exchg.150).aspx

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Do you have any idea much mail the average user receives each year? If you have the office 365 enterprise plans, the mailboxes are 100GB and unlimited online archives. The small business plans are 50GN total, but you might be able to buy more space for users who need it. Even with the smaller 50GB, if they receive less than 10 GB a year, they'll be good for 5 years. Deleted retention can be increased.

You can use retention policies and litigation hold to prevent users from deleting mail.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn7...

You can set former employee mailboxes to shared and in litigation hold so the data isn't lost.
--
Diane Poremsky
M365 MVP, specializing in Outlook, Exchange, and Microsoft 365 apps.

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Thanks, I'll take a look and pass this along for review. With all policies being up for review and changes, hopefully this is one we can work on in the coming month. The unlimited archiving would probably be a huge help.

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Using unlimited archiving and the combination of litigation hold (only included in Exchange Plan 2), you can even withdraw the license to your users and still be able to consult the information and retain it forever in the cloud.

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/manage...

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Off hand, I don't know specifically how much. Users are in contact with the different departments regarding progress on specifics of the job they are working on as well as in touch with vendors related to the project and possibly the clients project team to ensure the jobs are following the correct specs. This could be straight text emails, PDF receipts or even CAD files so I would guess 10-50MB a week depending on the job and the specific user. That being the case they should be under those numbers for sure.

The litigation hold is what was suggested, but it sounded like it would need to be manually set for each person, so I wasn't sure if this was the right fix or not since I'd want this to be company wide. I'll have to sit down and look more at the difference between the litigation hold and delete after 5 years.

Thanks for the help, I appreciate it!

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Yeah, litigation hold may not be the best option, unless you have a problem with users deleting mail they should be keepting. Group policy can block pst files, so the user in your example would need to use folders in his own mailbox or in the online archive.

With Outlook's ability to sync only recent mail, the user could use a folder in his mailbox and let the server automatically move mail to the online archive as it ages.
--
Diane Poremsky
M365 MVP, specializing in Outlook, Exchange, and Microsoft 365 apps.

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I don't know what they used prior to my starting here, but it's believed he was making his own own backups because he felt saving it to the network took too long, but he also couldn't have just one archive because the archives would start to take too long to search and apparently corrupted a few times when they got too big. Are there any concerns or issues with searching for an email from say 4 years ago if a user uses... 5GB a year? (so 20GB to search through).

Is using 365 a more "current" method compared to running an exchange server yourself, or are there still enough differences that some companies would really prefer/better utilize their own exchange server. 365 seems like less for us to have to manage so I'm fine look at that, I was just curious.

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>> Are there any concerns or issues with searching for an email from say 4 years ago if a user uses... 5GB a year? (so 20GB to search through).

In my opinion, searching is fast, but maybe not as fast as searching the local store. If the user has a need to search frequently, one of the 3rd party search utilities might be a good option. (I have a lot of legal clients who use search utilities - x1 is popular)


>> Is using 365 a more "current" method compared to running an exchange server yourself
Office 365 is definitely more current - feature changes are available here first and some features will never be added to the on-prem version (often because of hardware requirements).

Office 365 is easier to manage since Microsoft takes care of keeping the updates installed. Smaller orgs can manage it themselves without a full time IT & is cost-effective for smaller orgs, compared to having more servers, static ips and the software licenses. Some huge orgs also use office 365, but some companies (of all sizes) don't want cloud storage or have other security needs and prefer on-prem exchange, or they feel its more cost-effective.
--
Diane Poremsky
M365 MVP, specializing in Outlook, Exchange, and Microsoft 365 apps.

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Hi Mudpuppet,

Please feel free to let me know if you have any further concern on this case. With pleasure, we are always here for you. 

@VictorPerezCMG and Diane, thanks for your sharing here. 

Regards,

Alan

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Last updated September 30, 2021 Views 311 Applies to: