Microsoft 365 Archive: File-level archiving General Availability
🚨 The Signal: Microsoft 365 Archive now supports file-level archiving in SharePoint, moving individual files to cold storage. This optimizes costs while retaining existing security, compliance, and eDiscovery capabilities, but introduces a potential delay for file reactivation.
The Impact
All Microsoft 365 commercial and education tenants are affected, with a low security risk due to consistent application of existing security controls.
- Users with edit permissions can archive files, potentially impacting immediate data access if not managed.
- Users with read permissions can reactivate files, but delays up to 24 hours could affect business continuity.
- Security teams must ensure existing data governance policies are understood in the context of archive delays.
- Compliance teams should verify that the archiving process aligns with data retention and eDiscovery requirements.
The Action
- Review existing data retention and eDiscovery policies to ensure they account for file-level archiving and reactivation delays.
- Communicate to end-users the process for archiving and reactivating files, including potential delays.
- Monitor audit logs for archiving and reactivation activities to ensure compliance and detect anomalies.
- Verify that sensitivity labels and permissions are correctly inherited and applied to archived files.
Domain: SharePoint · Impact: low · Workload: SharePoint