Microsoft 365 has become the nucleus for many organizations for centralized communication and collaboration, especially large organizations with more than 1,000 full-time employees. One million companies globally use 365 and create 1.6 billion documents each day on the platform and in the next two years, that is expected to grow by 4.4 times, according to a recent research report. Business-critical data is growing the fastest in SaaS environments – from Microsoft Azure to Microsoft 365 and Salesforce. As it does, it’s imperative for organizations to ensure long-term data access to minimize compliance risk. Managing and protecting long-term data in Microsoft 365 cannot be an afterthought anymore.

Moving to a Data-Driven Era to Fight Data Loss Fears 

The above-mentioned research finds that 20% of a typical digital estate is made up of records (both legacy and future, born-digital records) that are bound by regulation and legislation. The consequences for non-compliance due to data loss, accidental deletion, lack of recovery, lock-in, or discovery and auditing challenges are increasingly becoming too large a risk profile for companies to manage internally. 

Digital transformation and digital consolidation have seen a number of organizations using  Microsoft 365 as their destination to view and manage documents, though that can bring its own challenges.  Whilst the important information from decommissioned or legacy systems is now centralized, as it was never native to Microsoft, in many instances it’s now unreadable. So digital transformation has streamlined infrastructure, and, technically it’s being maintained, but is it usable? That’s the piece of the jigsaw that still carries significant risk without a consistent digital preservation strategy in place to keep these documents alive, readable, and accessible. 

While IT leaders have concerns about the data in SaaS platforms, IDC research confirms SaaS data management and data preservation strategies are an afterthought for most organizations, even though a quarter of IT budgets are dedicated to managing data. Simple archiving is not enough. Companies need a digital preservation strategy. It is not possible to manage this effort in a separate, labor-intensive way in the long run. Companies need to establish a consistent, scalable, and reliable way to preserve records to keep them readable and usable to reduce the risk and the costs of non-compliance.

IDC predicts that in the next four years, 80% of Global 2000 CIOs will mandate company-wide data logistics strategies for data management, protection, and integration. Savvy organizations are already laying the foundation.

Ensuring Data Access Is Successful 

Of the billions of “born-digital” documents created in Microsoft 365 each day, a third needs to be retained for at least seven years and in highly regulated industries, even longer. Several factors could lead to data loss – from a lack of policy-driven retention to unreadable formats, slow retrievals, cost inefficiencies, and even accidental or malicious deletions.

While data availability is the top capability (deemed essential) for successful data governance and management for 44% of organizations, fewer than 13% of organizations rated their cloud governance and automation capabilities as “excellent,” according to the IDC report.

Organizations now have the opportunity to combine long-term data governance and management capabilities seamlessly, leveraging people’s work within Microsoft 365. Data and archiving aren’t siloed processes; they are part of a broader data logistics strategy, and when done well, they can provide organizations with better business outcomes and competitive advantage. 

Modernizing archiving and governance capabilities, with a focus on access and compliance, will become a central focus for IT departments and budgets in the years ahead. Organizations should have a digital preservation strategy for actionable data not only to minimize compliance risk as business-critical data grows exponentially in SaaS environments, but to ensure long-term data access and competitive advantage as well. Archiving and digital preservation solutions can be integrated into Microsoft 365 workflows, making this task less of a burden on CIOs and their teams. With predicted mandates by 2028, now is the time to devise and execute a plan before the clock starts ticking and the pressure is on.