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?