Any suggestions for best practices for email archiving with 0365?

[resonantenergy]

For organizations that won't delete emails and must archive everything, is there a best practice for outlook email archiving? We're looking at changing up how we manage our archiving. At the moment we're currently just using Microsoft's hosting to archive our emails, but were looking for better implementations such as merging into a master archive account, etc.

[JCDavid]

Have you looked at Microsoft Purview?

[resonantenergy]

I just looked into it. It seems useful from a data indexing, protection, etc perspective. Not exactly what my organization needs. We're looking to implement a means of archiving the various inboxes that have accumulated over the years into a more centralized place. Not just in terms of viewing though, but also data storage. Our O365 subscriptions are growing and were looking to prune and reorganize the licensing and accounts to make them more manageable and build new off-boarding processes to prevent future bloating.

[JCDavid]

totally get it. I watched the monthly bill grow and grow when I was an IT director... I preferred doing it the way you are now, but we sometimes would store email archives on a local fileserver, depending on who it was. An Amazon S3(Glacier) bucket that does not allow public access might be a solution or something along the lines of this may be worth evaluating. https://www.avepoint.com/products/cloud/microsoft-365-archiving

I recall also using some cloud-to-cloud backup capability through Barracuda. We were already paying for Cuda for security, but it also was able to help archive things.

[resonantenergy]

Optimally there would be a way to merge and manage the outlook data files directly through one suite of software. The industry I work in is such that even decades down the line a single email could save the potential for a multi-hundred thousand dollar payment of insurance. Search-ability as well as ease of management would be optimal.