It is crucial to prevent unauthorized deletion or modification of data from cloud platforms; else, any user could manipulate the essential data of your organization. In Microsoft 365, you are provided with two native features, which include Retention Policies and Litigation Hold.
These two functions might sound similar to you, but they are entirely different as they fulfill different roles. Thus, understanding the difference between these two functions is vital in order to prevent security breaches and secure your organization’s data.
Here, we will talk about how these two policies are different than each other, how they can be used, and how they can minimize the risk of data loss in your organization.
The data retention policy in Microsoft 365 is used for the prevention of malicious deletion or alteration of valuable data. However, these policies vary from business to business based on their risk profile, internal policies, and work environment.
As mentioned above, retention policies are used to protect valuable data from accidental deletion. Moreover, it can be applied to the entire organization, a group of users, as well as a single mailbox. When you create an organization-wide retention policy, it would be applicable to all users.
In our opinion, the Flagging data is an ideal option that businesses should choose, as it will protect you from potential data breaches.
Litigation Hold is not a general-purpose feature like retention policy. It is a unique functionality of the eDiscovery feature in Exchange Online that is helpful in freezing prominent data, which is more prone to deletion. Earlier, it was applicable to entire mailboxes, but now you can decide what data or content you want to protect.
There is a solid reason behind using both retention policy and litigation hold in Microsoft 365. For instance, if you use retention policy, then the aging out data could be disposed of automatically during litigation. Similarly, if you use only Litigation Hold with applying retention policy, then any data deleted before implementing litigation hold might be out of your reach.
Below are a few points that describe both these functions in a simple way.
These points clearly define the use of both Retention Policy and Litigation Hold in Microsoft 365, and how they could be beneficial to preserve and secure your data.
Both Retention Policy and Litigation Hold provide security to your data. But both these facilities are available with a high-end Microsoft 365 subscription. In case you are using a basic Microsoft 365 subscription, then you won’t be able to take advantage of these facilities. In such situations, it’s better to backup your Microsoft 365 data continuously with the help of a useful tool like Kernel Office 365 backup & Restore.