Email Archiving for Microsoft 365

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is Acronis Email Archiving for Microsoft 365?

  Acronis Email Archiving is a secure, cloud-based solution that automatically captures and retains all email communications sent or received via Microsoft 365. It enables organizations to meet legal, regulatory, and internal governance requirements by preserving emails in an immutable archive, making them quickly searchable, legally admissible, and easy to manage.
  
  The service is fully integrated into Acronis Cyber Protect, allowing IT teams to manage archiving alongside other security and backup features from a single, centralized console. It’s designed to eliminate manual effort while ensuring organizations stay compliant and prepared for audits, investigations, or legal discovery.

• Do I still need email archiving if I'm backing up Microsoft 365 emails?

  Yes. While backup and archiving both protect email data, they serve very different purposes.
  
  • Backup is designed for recovery —it allows you to restore emails or mailboxes after accidental deletion, corruption, or cyberattacks.
  
  • Archiving, on the other hand, is about long-term retention, compliance, and legal discoverability. It captures all emails in real time, stores them immutably, and makes them easily searchable—even if a user deletes the original message from their mailbox.
  
  If your organization must comply with regulations, respond to audits, or prepare for legal proceedings, archiving is essential. It ensures email data remains accessible, verifiable, and tamper-proof—complementing your backup strategy, not replacing it.

• How is email data protected in the archive?

  Archived data is protected through multiple layers of security:
  
  • AES-256 encryption at rest and TLS encryption in transit ensure data confidentiality.
  
  • Immutable storage (WORM format) prevents any changes or deletions until the retention period ends.
  
  • Audit logs capture all user actions for traceability, enabling full transparency during audits or forensic investigations.
  
  This layered approach ensures your data meets the security and integrity requirements of even the most stringent regulatory frameworks.

• Can I search across all archived emails?

  Yes. Acronis provides full-text and metadata-based search across all archived mailboxes.
  You can:
  
  • Use advanced filters to narrow results by sender, recipient, subject line, date range, keywords, and more
  
  • Save commonly used search queries
  
  • Preview emails before deciding to export or recover them
  
  • Export email sets for legal teams or compliance officers in industry-standard formats
  
  This ensures rapid and accurate retrieval of information—critical in legal proceedings, HR investigations, or regulatory audits.
  
  

• Can we restore or recover emails from the archive?

  Yes. Authorized users can restore archived emails in several ways:
  
  • Restore to the original mailbox if the user still exists
  
  • Restore to an alternate mailbox or another Microsoft 365 organization if needed
  
  • Download individual attachments directly from the archive without restoring the full message
  
  This flexibility helps organizations respond quickly to business needs or external inquiries without disrupting the primary email system.

• Can we apply legal hold on certain emails?

  Yes. Legal hold can be applied to preserve emails beyond their standard retention period.
  Once an email is placed under legal hold:
  
  • It is exempt from deletion, even if its retention policy has expired
  
  • It cannot be modified or altered in any way
  
  • It remains accessible only to authorized personnel
  
  This is especially useful when your organization is involved in litigation, regulatory reviews, or internal investigations and must ensure data integrity for specific email records.

• Can we define different retention policies across teams or departments?

  Absolutely. Acronis allows you to define granular, customizable retention policies by user, mailbox, department, or domain.
  This enables your IT and compliance teams to:
  
  • Align data retention practices with legal and regulatory requirements
  
  • Meet internal governance or record-keeping standards
  
  • Automatically apply policies to newly created mailboxes
  
  You can configure how long emails are retained (e.g., 1 year, 7 years, indefinitely) and whether to automatically delete them at the end of the policy period—simplifying ongoing compliance.

• Where is the email data stored, and how do we manage data residency?

  Acronis stores archived Microsoft 365 email data in one of 50+ global data centers, operated by Acronis or trusted providers like Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
  During setup, you can select your preferred storage region to comply with your organization’s data residency requirements or national data sovereignty laws (e.g., GDPR, Brazil LGPD, or Australia Privacy Act).
  
  This ensures your data stays in a legally compliant geographic zone, with full transparency and control over where it's hosted.

• Is any additional hardware or infrastructure required?

  No. Acronis Email Archiving is a fully cloud-native, SaaS-based solution.
  There is no hardware to install, no complex maintenance tasks, and no need to provision additional storage. Deployment is fast and handled directly through your existing Acronis Cyber Protect environment.
  
  This makes it ideal for IT teams looking to expand their compliance capabilities without expanding their infrastructure.
  
  • What compliance regulations does this help us address?
  
  Acronis Email Archiving supports long-term data retention and discovery requirements outlined by a wide range of regulations, including:
  
  • GDPR – for EU data retention and right-to-access provisions
  
  • HIPAA – for health data audit trails and secure storage
  
  • NIS2 Directive – for operational security in essential sectors
  
  • SEC Rule 17a-4 and CFTC Rule 1.31 – for financial services and trading records
  
  • FOIA and public sector recordkeeping mandates
  
  • BS 10008 – for legal admissibility of electronic information
  
  • and more
  
  With flexible policies, immutable storage, audit logging, and legal hold, the solution provides all the essential tools needed to maintain compliance with global and industry-specific data governance frameworks.

• I'm a customer with on-premises installation, how can I get Acronis Email Archiving for M365?

  To start using Acronis Email Archiving for M365, you will need to have a license to access the management console in the Acronis cloud. This new cloud installation will allow you to protect and secure a wide range of new environments and platforms so you will need to configure settings accordingly (i.e. the system will not include your previous on-premises backup and security configurations.)