Microsoft Teams Archiving: A Necessity for Compliance and eDiscovery

Due to the pandemic, many people were forced to work remotely for the first time, causing communication and collaboration issues between workgroups, clients, and even between the company and employees. As a result, companies rushed to embrace collaboration applications like Zoom, Slack, Meet, WebEx, Jabber, Microsoft Teams, etc., to keep their suddenly remote workforce connected and productive. 

Since so many businesses rely on Microsoft's Office 365 suite for their day-to-day operations, it's no surprise that most of them turned to MS Teams to help their workers communicate successfully while working from home. But while the immediate focus was on the employees' productivity, businesses should now also consider what the rapid surge in new application usage implies for their data retention and management, compliance, and litigation requirements.


Compliance

Several compliance regulations require companies to preserve certain records for at least six years. For example, SEC compliance Rule 17, FINRA, GDPR, etc., demands organizations consider how they collect, process, store, and safeguard data in a compliant manner. Similarly, HIPAA-regulated companies must have procedures to secure private patient information shared through modes of communication. Therefore, all data, including MS Teams data and metadata, must be captured and stored for compliance, regulatory, and eDiscovery requirements.


Companies can use the Microsoft Teams' built-in backup and archiving solutions to cater to such compliance requirements partially.


Backup

When a group or chat in MS Teams is deleted, the data is removed from the platform and retained in the backend in Office 365. Microsoft deletes the information permanently after 30 days; therefore, if needed, the data must be recovered before the 30-day period expires.


Archiving

When a group or chat is archived in MS Teams, the data is stored in SharePoint. The members of the group or chat can be restricted from editing the content by selecting "Make the SharePoint site read-only for team members." This declares the MS Teams data as "read-only" and freezes it for regulatory, legal, or eDiscovery considerations until the owner of the group or the chat or the administrator restores it.


This implies that the archived MS Teams group or chats can be restored and edited or permanently deleted by the group or chat owner, posing a litigation hold issue. Therefore, a read-only copy of all archived groups and chats must be journaled and stored using third-party information archiving solutions for compliance reasons. Similarly, the deleted chat or group may never be retained if the information is not archived within 30 days; therefore, companies must implement organization-level retention policies in each of the Office 365 applications.


eDiscovery in Microsoft Teams

eDiscovery is the process of identifying, collecting, and producing electronically stored information (ESI) as evidence during litigation. This makes all MS Teams' data, including the metadata, searchable during eDiscovery. Therefore, companies must capture and secure all MS Teams' data, including the deleted and archived data, legally and defensively when litigation is expected.


In reality, when it comes to litigation hold and eDiscovery, MS Teams has a fairly complex persona. For starters, not all MS Teams information is searchable within MS Teams as they are stored in different locations in Office 365 depending on the type of content.

  • All 1:1 and group discussions in Teams are preserved in the relevant users' mailboxes and, therefore, discoverable only in the user's mailbox.

  • All files, images, audio recordings, etc., are stored in the respective users' Office 365 SharePoint or OneDrive. 

  • All calendar event invites, and similar data are stored in the respective users' Outlook.


Since MS Teams saves data across several Office 365 applications, identifying and collecting them in response to litigation can be complicated and time-consuming as it may require searching six or seven separate Office 365 storage locations. Therefore, companies must implement a Microsoft Teams archiving solution that provides a single dashboard for searching, securing, and reviewing Teams content for regulatory compliance and eDiscovery.


Conclusion

Microsoft Teams is a very effective collaboration tool, and with the Office 365 suite, it is arguably one of the best applications today. But companies using the tool are responsible for maintaining compliance and not the other way round. Therefore, companies must include Microsoft Teams in their data archiving solutions with a single dashboard for finding, protecting, and evaluating Teams material for eDiscovery and better information management.

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