Navigating Data Retention Policy Challenges with Third-Party SaaS Applications

The Hidden Risks in SaaS Data Retention Policies: What Every IT Leader Should Know

Data retention policies are essential for organizations to maintain valuable information for appropriate timeframes while ensuring compliance with increasingly complex industry regulations. These governance frameworks determine how your business manages critical data throughout its entire lifecycle—from creation and active use through archival and eventual disposal.

Today's businesses rely heavily on SaaS applications like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Google Workspace to power their most critical operations. However, this shift to cloud-based services has created a dangerous gap many IT leaders overlook. The default retention capabilities of third-party vendors frequently fail to align with your specific compliance requirements and long-term data protection objectives. This misalignment creates significant exposure for organizations that mistakenly assume their SaaS providers have fully addressed their retention responsibilities.

Why Data Retention Policies Matter in SaaS Environments

Effective data retention policies govern the complete lifecycle of your business-critical information, establishing clear guidelines for preservation of timeframes, storage methodologies, and secure deletion protocols. These policies transcend simple administrative procedures to become essential governance tools that shield your organization from compliance violations, unexpected data loss, and potentially costly legal exposure.

The rapid adoption of SaaS platforms has fundamentally transformed the data management landscape, introducing new complexities to retention strategies that many organizations aren't prepared to address. When your most sensitive information resides in vendor-controlled cloud environments rather than on-premises, traditional approaches to data governance fall short. The distributed nature of SaaS data, combined with limited visibility and control capabilities, creates significant challenges for maintaining consistent, compliant retention practices.

This challenge becomes particularly acute for organizations operating in highly regulated industries with strict compliance demands. Healthcare providers navigating HIPAA requirements, financial institutions adhering to FINRA regulations, and global enterprises subject to GDPR all face specific compliance mandates that standard SaaS vendor retention settings frequently fail to address adequately. 

These regulations typically demand longer retention periods, more granular control mechanisms, and more robust audit capabilities than are standard with most SaaS applications, creating a critical gap that requires immediate attention.

Vendor-Specific Challenges: Understanding the Limitations

Microsoft 365

Despite its robust feature set, you should know Microsoft 365 data retention is limited.¹ The platform has default retention limitations specifically for Exchange Online and SharePoint data that may not satisfy your organization's compliance requirements or business continuity needs.

Key Microsoft 365 Retention Limitations:

1. Microsoft, Data retention, deletion, and destruction in Microsoft 365, May 17, 2025

Without implementing proper supplemental data protection, organizations face substantial risks of data loss through accidental deletions or Microsoft storage policies, which prioritize operational efficiency over comprehensive long-term retention.

Salesforce

Salesforce environments present unique retention challenges,² as inherent data export and retention constraints affect customer records, historical task data, and business-critical workflows.

Organizations relying exclusively on native Salesforce capabilities frequently discover significant compliance gaps resulting from the platform's limited backup options, essentially restricted to a basic "Recycle Bin" feature that does not fit true retention management capabilities.

Salesforce Data Retention Limitations Table:

2. Salesforce, Manage How Customer Data Is Retained

Salesforce Compliance Readiness Checklist:

• Implemented automated daily backups beyond the native capabilities of Salesforce
• Established retention periods matching industry compliance requirements (not just Salesforce defaults)
• Created granular recovery capabilities for individual records and relationships
• Developed audit trails for data access, modification, and deletion events
• Tested recovery processes to validate compliance with RTO/RPO objectives
• Documented retention policies specifically addressing Salesforce data

Google Workspace

Google Workspace environments face particular retention limitations³ for Gmail communications, Drive documents, and Sheets data, especially in today's distributed work scenarios where business-critical information is constantly created and shared across remote teams.

While Google provides some retention capabilities through Google Vault, these features are not the same as data protection compliance and eDiscovery purposes that can organizations need to prevent data loss and regulatory penalties.

Google Workspace Retention Limitations:

3. Google, How retention works

Critical Google Workspace Retention Considerations:

1. Regulatory alignment: Standard Google retention periods typically max out at 30 days, while regulations like HIPAA, FINRA, and GDPR often require retention periods measured in years
2. Deletion vulnerability: Native protection fails to safeguard against both accidental and malicious deletion scenarios
3. Cross-application gaps: Vault coverage varies significantly across different Google applications
4. Restoration limitations: Search and export capabilities ≠ true restoration functionality
5. Licensing constraints: Advanced retention features require premium licensing tiers

Relying on SaaS Vendors for Data Retention: Mind the Gap

When comparing short-term versus long-term retention policies, a critical gap becomes evident: SaaS vendor policies typically prioritize operational data management over comprehensive long-term data retention and archival needs. This fundamental misalignment leaves organizations vulnerable to compliance breaches and data loss scenarios when information needs to be retained beyond the SaaS vendor's standard timeframes—a common requirement in many regulated industries.

Organizations have faced serious legal consequences from inadequate data retention coverage for their SaaS environments. When litigation or regulatory audits require access to historical data that wasn't properly retained, the resulting penalties and reputational damage can be severe, even when the organization believed its SaaS vendor was adequately handling retention responsibilities. This disconnect between expectation and reality creates significant business risk.

Perhaps most concerning is the control imbalance inherent in SaaS environments: vendors establish the rules and technical limitations, but businesses bear full accountability during compliance audits. When relying solely on SaaS vendor retention policies, this lack of granular control creates a dangerous situation where responsibility and authority are misaligned, leaving organizations exposed to compliance risks they cannot fully mitigate without implementing additional protection measures.

Build a Comprehensive Data Retention Strategy for SaaS Applications

IT professionals need systematic guidance and purpose-built tools for assessing retention gaps in their SaaS environments to identify precisely where vendor capabilities fall short of compliance requirements. This assessment should thoroughly examine each SaaS platform's native retention features against the organization's specific regulatory obligations and established data governance policies.

SaaS Data Retention Assessment Checklist:

• Document regulatory requirements specific to your industry and regions of operation
• Inventory all SaaS applications containing business-critical or regulated data
• Review each vendor's SLA and retention capabilities against compliance requirements
• Identify gaps between vendor capabilities and compliance obligations
• Assess the potential business impact of data loss in each SaaS environment
• Evaluate current backup and retention solutions against identified requirements
• Develop a remediation plan for any identified compliance gaps
• Establish testing procedures to validate the retention policy's effectiveness

Whether your organization needs to satisfy HIPAA's patient record retention requirements, GDPR's right-to-be-forgotten provisions, or FINRA's long-term data preservation mandates, our platform provides the flexibility and control to align your retention practices with your exact regulatory landscape. This ensures you remain compliant today and prepared for tomorrow's evolving requirements.

Arcserve SaaS Backup Aids SaaS Data Retention

Retention is a critical concept in data management, but it’s important to recognize that it can have two distinct meanings. The first focuses on retention as the period of time backup data is stored within a dedicated backup solution. The second refers to how long a platform like Microsoft 365 or other primary SaaS tools hold onto deleted data before it is purged. 

Often overlooked, the connection between these two definitions highlights the urgent need for a comprehensive backup solution. While platforms like Microsoft 365 may retain deleted data for a short, predefined time, this retention is not a substitute for long-term protection. 

This is where Arcserve SaaS Backup becomes indispensable, bridging the gap between these concepts by securely managing retention from a backup perspective. With Arcserve, IT professionals ensure deleted data is safeguarded well beyond the limits of a SaaS provider’s retention policy, delivering both peace of mind and a powerful safety net for their organization.

Arcserve SaaS Backup is a comprehensive cloud-native, cloud-to-cloud backup solution designed to protect your data hosted in SaaS application clouds such as Microsoft Office 365, Entra ID, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Salesforce, Google Workspace, and Zendesk.

A single pane of glass for SaaS backups: Enjoy super-fast navigation while retaining complete control over the protected data with multi-tenant and Role-Based Access Controls (RBAC). 

Top-notch security and compliance: Arcserve SaaS Backup and its utilized data centers maintain ISO/IEC 27001:2013 and ISAE 3402-II certifications and comply with major regulations, like HIPAA.

Cost-effectiveness: Take advantage of a single price per seat that includes all SaaS data protection functionalities.

• Custom backup retention settings to meet your compliance requirements
• Cloud storage options with license-based pricing enable fast access & restores, without worries about the volume of backup data
• No additional charges for data traffic: ingress, egress, or transaction fees

Security, scalability, and availability by design: Data in transit and data at rest are encrypted with a default 30-day delete retention. Four copies of the backup data in two different data centers within the same region guarantee data sovereignty and redundancy.

Taking Control of Your SaaS Data Retention

Relying solely on SaaS vendors for data retention creates dangerous gaps in your compliance strategy and data resilience posture. While platforms like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Google Workspace provide valuable business capabilities, their default retention policies weren't designed to address today's organizations' complex data compliance requirements.

Arcserve SaaS Backup empowers IT teams with comprehensive data protection beyond basic vendor offerings. It delivers advanced protection that ensures retention policies are comprehensive, compliant, and entirely under your control. This purpose-built solution directly addresses the inherent data retention challenges in third-party SaaS environments, providing the protection needed to maintain compliance while maximizing the value of your SaaS investments.

Request a demo or sign up for a free trial of Arcserve SaaS Backup today!