Save Money by Reclaiming Microsoft 365 Licenses and Storage from Former Employees
In this era of remote and hybrid workforces, turnover is much more prevalent. It’s not so bad if all an organization had to do was collect the employee’s badge, watch as they clear their desk, and escort them out of the building. This is the remote era and when an employee leaves, IT organizations are left with the task of dealing with the data that employee leaves behind. What do you do with their SaaS data (for example, data from Microsoft 365) and how do you free up costly licenses when an employee leaves?
- · Option 1. Do nothing.
- · Option 2. Scour each SaaS app, run searches, collect their data, store it somewhere else, and free up their license. This is manual and can take up to 2-3 days of effort depending on how embedded the employee was in the organization
- · Option 3. Automated ex-employee backup with Veritas Alta™ SaaS Protection. Using Active Directory (AD) attributes, Veritas Alta SaaS Protection can automatically back up an ex-employee’s data to a secure backup location, maintaining all the folder structures and permissions. This is great because it provides huge savings – not just in license costs but also in time that IT staff spends on this.
The flip side is dealing with “boomerangs” – you know, the employees that leave and then come back. What happens then? How do you re-create all the SaaS application data they had before they left?
If you opted for Option 1, it’s no problem at all. That is, other than the fact that you’ve been paying for storage and licenses no one was using for months.
With Option 2, it depends on exactly how you collected and stored the information and how easily accessible the data is.
With Option 3, it’s as simple as a few clicks to perform a restore and the returning employee has all their data back, exactly the way they left it.
Enterprises have many IT-related maintenance tasks to attend to regularly. One of these that feels like it should be very simple is what to do with an employee’s data once they’re no longer an employee. This can actually be more troublesome than you might think at first, especially for email and files – for both of which most enterprises use Microsoft 365.
Regardless of the reason an employee leaves (being let go, getting laid off, leaving for a new opportunity, etc.) they leave behind data that still has value to the organization – particularly for compliance reasons. An employee no longer being with the company does not relieve you of any regulatory requirements to retain that information.
If you’d like to learn more about how Veritas Alta SaaS Protection can help reduce your Microsoft 365 costs by reclaiming licenses and storage for reuse, read our solution brief on the topic or contact us today for further discussion or a demo.
