Looking for a cost effective way to archive 6 months mail for 18,000 users.

[the_dude]

I'm using the Office 365 A2 plan. Cloud based would be preferable.

 

Thanks.

[jamesbmarshall]

When you say archive... do you mean you just need to attempt to keep mail items for 6 months but if a user purges them it doesn't matter, or must you absolutely keep every mail item for a 6 month rolling window for compliance purposes?

 

If it's the former, you could just turn on the online archive for mailboxes and set up some retention policies to move mail items to the archive and delete after 6 months.

 

If the latter, Exchange Online Plan 2 gives you the increased single item recovery window.

 

Or, you can journal off to another service (i.e. on-premises mail server like Exchange, another cloud service that cannot be Exchange Online, etc.).

[the_dude]

it's the latter I'm interested in. We need to keep 6 months for compliance reasons. Do you have any recommendations for cloud services?

[jamesbmarshall]

Well clearly there's one...

 

That said, there are others like Proofpoint, but I don't have first hand experience of configuring it, or what the costs might be like compared with Exchange Online Plan 2.