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back that data up and associate a data retention policy with the backup. That way, the organization can be sure the data within the backup will be preserved for the required amount of time. Reason 3: Retention Policy Confusion and Gaps A third reason why it is so important to back up your Microsoft 365 deployment is because of the potential for gaps and other types of confusion within your retention policy. I talked a bit about retention policies in the previous section and mentioned that some organizations adhere to data retention policies because of a regulatory compliance mandate, while other organizations base retention policies on their own operational requirements. Regardless of why a retention policy might have been put in place, strictly adhering to a retention policy can be surprisingly difficult. The main reason for this is that there is no such thing as a centralized mechanism for managing retention policies across your entire organization. Think about it for a moment. A mechanism that establishes a retention policy for one of your line-of-business applications has no impact on the retention policies associated with things like Microsoft's Exchange Online or SharePoint. The problem with this is that because retention policies cannot be centrally enforced, the potential exists for inconsistencies or gaps in coverage. It's really difficult to verify that retention policies have been enabled for every application and data source in your entire organization, and that those retention policies have all been set to the same duration. On the surface, the challenge of maintaining retention policies would seem to have nothing to do with backing up Microsoft 365 or Microsoft Teams. Remember though, Teams stores data across the various Microsoft 365 applications.

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