For many businesses, keeping copies of their email communications is important for compliance. Fortunately, there are many options nowadays to efficiently maintain these email archives. There are cloud cloud-based storage solutions that can be conveniently used. Those who need to migrate legacy email archives to the cloud, however, may face some challenges.
To address these migration challenges, the two solutions commonly used are Microsoft Office 365’s in-place hold and third-party migration solutions like the Azure-based mailbox archive solution you can find when you click here.
Office 365’s In-Place Hold
Microsoft has no functionality for traditional central journal archiving but it has a compliant storage for email archives. The way it handles email archiving, however, is slightly different. Instead of copying all of the emails sent by an email account and saving this in an archive on the cloud, what happens is that Microsoft merely stores the main email copy (original) at the source through a “hold” feature in the standard retention folder. This is an efficient and compact way of handling email archives but can be problematic if you are moving huge volumes of content.
Third Party Archiving Solutions
Many third-party email, as well as journal archiving solutions, are criticized for being complicated and for making it difficult to retrieve data if a user decides to move to other other archiving solution. There are some, however, that make the process fast and easy.
You can find cloud service providers offering Azure-based mailbox archive solutions that address the downsides of on-premise and cloud-based archives. They do this by making their solutions highly scalable but at an affordable cost and with modifiable policy-scoped indexing. Their solutions also entail ease in moving data to and from the platform without contractual commitments. Additionally, these solutions come with eDiscovery capabilities that are not reliant on Office 365 license level.
Companies that provide the third party archiving solution described above usually also provide Azure cloud storage and archiving services. As such, they doubtlessly have the experience and competence to properly handle Azure mailbox archiving. Typically, there are only a few steps required to use these third-party solutions. First, you need to establish SMTP servers to capture messages and write them to the designated file storage. Next, a message queue obtains the messages from the SMTP server. The messages are then sent to Azure through a virtual cloud gateway. The messages can then be located using the eDiscovery interface without the need to buy E5 licensing.
If you find it difficult to comprehend the details mentioned here, the good news is that you don’t have to worry about it. Most companies that offer Azure-based archive solutions are willing to provide the technical assistance you need. You just have to contact their support team. They can competently address your concerns and ensure that you will not have problems with your email archive compliance.
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