Addressing Office 365 Email Archiving Limitations With UDP 6.5

JUNE 12TH, 2017

Adoption of Office 365 has grown by leaps and bounds. That said, the platform isn't without its limitations. So, if you're considering making the move, you'll want to address the burden of your old archive email, as well as the lack of journaling capabilities.

And, Arcserve UDP 6.5 can help.

Office 365 is increasing in popularity

The adoption rate of Office 365 has increased several fold in the last few years. In fact, according to a report, one of every five corporate employees uses an Office 365 cloud service today. Exchange online is the second most popular choice in the Office suite.

Office 365 cloud service adoption rate

Exchange online is also the most popular application in industries like Finance and Manufacturing.

Office 365 cloud usage by industry

The email protection context

With such a widespread usage of Exchange Online comes the challenge of safely archiving that important email data, which may be highly vulnerable to threats like accidental deletion, disasters, and more.

What's more, email data is the most sought after documentation for compliance audits, e-discovery and other processes. And, that warrants a secure and searchable email archive.

Arcserve UDP v6.5 offers the most reliable, high performance Office 365 Exchange backup solution. It's configured to handle the task of safely protecting your Office 365 email data, including calendar items, contacts, Skype conversations, and more.

Backups can be stored on premise or on any cloud platform where a UDP recovery point server is installed.

Even better, the simplified UI, which brings all controls into a single console, is built on the foundation of our existing UDP solution, delivering a powerful, intuitive experience.

UDP 6.5 email archiving delivers critical capabilities to Office 365

Support for multiple tenants

While most of the backup vendors do not have capability to backup data from more than one organization, UDP 6.5 is able to protect multiple organizations within the same console to the same recovery point server. This eliminates the cost of installing multiple instances to protect different organizations.

multi-tenant Office 365 email archiving console

Data storage

Data is stored in a comprehensive binary format to record all granular details required by any organization. This is preferable to a jet database, which has several functional and performance limitations. The reason: Jet Database is common for all tenants, which means A.com and B.com will be backed-up to the same non encrypted database file. And this database file represents a single point of failure that can grow up to several gigabytes in size, and can’t be split or re-created for at least one year.

UDP, however, gives you the flexibility of saving to the same or different datastores with strong encryption algorithms available for each different version.

What's more, to deliver the best performance and ease of use, UDP allows admins to break the backups into smaller jobs with manageable user counts.

Auto Protect

As a standard practice, the on-premise exchange server users are migrated to Office 365 in phases. Most of the email archiving solutions which protect Exchange Online can’t auto detect the recently migrated users to Office 365, and therefore the backup jobs have to be modified manually to add new users. This task is vulnerable to human error and can result in potential data loss if any user is left out.

With UDP 6.5's auto protect feature, admins don’t have to worry about the newly migrated users, as they will be added automatically. Of course, users can always select what to protect.

auto protect Office 365 mailboxes

Network throttling

Network infrastructure is the backbone for all modern businesses and administrators have the challenging task of keeping that network utilization under control to ensure highest business productivity and efficiency.

UDP 6.5 does an excellent job of optimizing the network bandwidth with flexible and dynamic throttle schedules suitable for individual requirements. Other email archiving solutions might choke the production network with the content downloads during backup since they lack this important capability.

email archive network throttling schedule

Retention logic for assured recovery

UDP 6.5 leverages a merge logic which assures that the state of the mailbox is preserved in the backup sessions instead of simply deleting the emails based on their age.

Example: If a user has two emails (A & B) on day one, and on day two the user deletes one and gets a new one, it now has A & C.

The backup occurs daily. And if the email retention is set to one day, then after the backup of day two, UDP will be able to restore A & C, whereas the competitors could only restore C.

Resource utilization

The code of UDP 6.5 is highly-optimized to ensure that it consumes a minimum amount of system resources to keep it healthy and running without impacting other tasks. Other email archiving solutions for Office 365 may consume half or more of that just to keep the jet database running. This usage goes up even further during backups, potentially freezing the system altogether.

email archiving task manager

memory usage during Office 365 email archiving


Your email data is critical to your business. So, if you're migrating to Office 365, reach out. We'd love to share how our email archiving solution can help.