Worth Reading – Ex-Employee OneDrive Retention: Why Data Is Kept Forever

There’s an important point that Nikki makes in this article, beyond the obvious one about getting charged for unlicensed OneDrive content.

Microsoft 365’s design intentionally prioritises preservation over deletion unless every control layer, identity, service lifecycle, retention, and holds, explicitly allows deletion. Without clear governance alignment, the default outcome is still indefinite preservation, not disposal.

https://nikkichapple.com/ex-employee-onedrive-retention/

This also brings to mind something I’ve been saying for years and will be discussing in upcoming webinars and other settings. The importance of understanding all of the potential places where preservation and/or deletion might be coming from.

In the case of a departed user on OneDrive, there may be a cost associated with data from now-unlicensed accounts remaining in your tenant. Many people might not like hearing that, and it does seem a little petty of Microsoft to count it differently from the overall amount of storage you are allocated. On the other hand, for the Information Governance part of my day job, it’s not the worst thing to have a mechanism that forces you to consider why that data is being retained and what decisions were made about it.

It’s imperative that organizations get their heads around what is happening. A departing user who is on hold is a very different animal. Having a retention policy that keeps everything in OneDrive for “x” number of years is also a potential added cost in this scenario, as is a short auto-deletion policy for eDiscovery collections. If your role only covers part of the M365 Purview workloads, you don’t know what you don’t know, and those things you don’t know might make a huge difference in how you should define your processes.

Go, find out what you don’t know. If this cost pushes your organization to do that, great!

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