It may be useful to archive your Office 365 mailbox if you do not need all those many emails but you are afraid to delete them because who knows when you may need them again.
There are many Office 365 archiving tools in the market, but unfortunately none of them works perfectly and protects you from the archiving and integration errors when you migrate your data to Microsoft online.
The first problem you can come across is that the archiving tool you have chosen just wouldn’t work well (or even work at all) with Office365. The migration errors may cause connection failures and the users wouldn’t be able to get access to their archived data. Some of the archiving tools may offer you alternative solution if you use a hybrid solution with the Office desktop applications, but that makes going to the cloud an absolutely useless effort.
If you do not plan to fill your life with solving every day hybrid environment issues you can also try to shift to a cloud-based archive. Just leave your old archived data where it was and start sending all the new Office 365 information to the new online archive. But this solution has its downturns as well. Your users may have many different locations where they need to have access to their archives, and this will cause the failure. So the only way left for you is to move all your archives to the cloud.
When you start migrating your data to the cloud you may find that there are tons of information that you actually do not need. The emails that have been kept in your company’s account for ages just in case. But how to tell the program which emails you need and which ones are just a piece of junk? If you try to sort it all out manually it may take you several days if not months (depending on how you handle the routine job). There are some tools for “intelligent migration” though.
But no matter which way you choose there will be a huge time gap when your users won’t be able to access their data.
To be always able to get your cloud data and to be 100% sure of its safety make sure that you regularly back up Office 365 data with third-party applications like Upsafe free Office365 backup tool.