Osterman Research: Archiving and Data Protection with Microsoft Teams

The number of people using Microsoft Teams exploded during 2020, driven primarily by the global health pandemic that forced most information workers to work from home. Teams became a seemingly perfect answer to urgent communication and collaboration needs as normal office-based rhythms were suddenly interrupted. User numbers leapt from 20 million in November 2019 to 115 million in October 2020 (and 145 million in April 2021). Users are drawn to the collaboration feature set in Teams, along with its integration into the wider productivity toolset in Microsoft 365.

As users have flocked to Teams, compliance officers, information governance professionals, and other risk management decision-makers are asking whether they have access to the right archiving and data protection capabilities for the many data types produced within Microsoft Teams. While Microsoft offers some native capabilities for archiving and data protection for Teams, third-party archiving and data protection solutions offer a range of elevated capabilities that enable firms to fully satisfy the compliance and privacy regulations to which modern organizations find themselves subject.