Archiving Third-Party Data with Office 365

 

Third-party connectors are key to importing data into Office 365 so that it can be archived or processed using Office 365 features such as Advanced eDiscovery. Organizations are increasingly using external services such as social media or instant messaging for work (left). They may need to archive and preserve this data for compliance or governance purposes.

Third-party connectors (center), which may run on-premises or be hosted in data centers using Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure, map the data from its original format into an e-mail message. An organization may need multiple connectors depending upon the data to be collected and preserved, and the regulations the organization must comply with. The connector uses the third-party service’s application programming interfaces to access the data.

The e-mail message enters a Microsoft data center (right) using an Azure service and Exchange Web Services, which stores the e-mail in a user’s hidden Purges subfolder in the Recoverable Items folder. If a user cannot be identified, the message is placed in a third-party mailbox for manual processing. The Recoverable Items folder is a special Exchange folder used for archiving messages and specialized handling, such as when e-mail is under litigation hold.