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- Solutions
- Restructuring, Mergers & Acquisitions
- Archive What Microsoft 365 Can’t Handle
Archive What Microsoft 365 Can’t Handle
You don’t just inherit systems during a merger & acquisition, you inherit years of journaled email, legacy archives, and regulated communication data. Much of this content cannot be preserved in Microsoft 365 without losing key metadata, immutability, or legal defensibility.
Expireon gives acquiring organizations a compliant way to preserve inherited data without disrupting legal holds, breaking chain of custody, or keeping fragile legacy platforms online.
Microsoft 365 Wasn’t Built for Inherited Archives
Microsoft 365 is designed for active productivity, not long-term legal preservation of historical archives and journal streams. In M&A, forcing everything into M365 often creates blind spots and delays when you need certainty most. What tends to break first:
Journal & Regulated Records
Journaled data is often compliance-driven and must retain strict preservation controls over long periods.
Teams / Collaboration Exports
Modern message data can lose context, threading, or metadata when forced into mailbox-style storage.
Legacy Systems You Can't Retire
Platforms like Enterprise Vault and SourceOne stay online until data has a compliant destination; despite being expensive, fragile, and often out of support.
Mandatory Retention in Regulated Industries
Financial services, healthcare, energy, and life sciences often require preservation standards that aren’t practical to meet for inherited archives inside M365 alone.
The Cloudficient Solution: Expireon
Expireon provides a secure, compliance-ready archive for inherited communication and collaboration data that cannot safely live in Microsoft 365. It keeps preserved data immutable, searchable, and defensible until it can be expired.
Business Outcomes
Retire legacy systems with confidence
Reduce legal and compliance exposure during integration
Accelerate integration speed by solving the “where does this data go?” problem early
Avoid delays that stall timelines
Improve eDiscovery responsiveness with preserved, searchable archives
Maintain defensibility with uninterrupted holds and preserved custody
Do you have data that doesn't belong in Microsoft 365?
Schedule a demo to see how Expireon supports defensible M&A preservation
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can’t journaled data be stored in Microsoft 365?
Journal data is created as an immutable compliance-focused record. Microsoft 365 does not support traditional journaling models, and storing journal streams inside user or shared mailboxes makes them unsuitable for regulatory preservation. Expireon preserves the original metadata, context, and legal integrity of journal data, ensuring it remains compliant and defensible.
Why does inherited M&A data often include journaled records?
Many acquired companies use journaling to meet FINRA, SEC, HIPAA, or internal compliance standards. These archives must remain intact after acquisition and cannot be disrupted without risking compliance violations and spoliation concerns.
Does Expireon maintain legal holds?
Yes. Expireon is legal-hold aware and preserves the complete chain of custody for protected content, ensuring no changes occur to items under hold while still allowing organizations to manage retention policies when holds are released.
To learn more about why these data types are unsuitable for Microsoft 365 and how Expireon provides a compliant home for them, check out our Limitations of Purview Guide.
How does Expireon help retire legacy systems?
Once data is migrated into Expireon, organizations can decommission Enterprise Vault, SourceOne, and other aging platforms with confidence that historical evidence remains preserved, searchable, and defensible in a modern, compliant environment. This reduces risk, cost, and operational complexity while honoring inherited legal and regulatory obligations.
What types of M&A data belong in Expireon rather than Microsoft 365?
Expireon is ideal for journal archives, legacy communication repositories, Teams or Slack exports from acquired companies, regulated content requiring immutable storage, oversized mailboxes exceeding M365 migration limits, and departed employee data that must be preserved for legal or regulatory reasons.