Hi,
Veeam Data Cloud Solution Engineer for M365 here, the exit strategy is that after cancellation of service you’ve got 30 days to request your data. Your data will be transferred in the most economic way to you available at the time of cancellation (who knows what options Microsoft Azure will permit in 5 years time for example). The data transferred is kept in the VB365 format, why? Because this way the data is still compressed (cost savings on storage at rest) and can be leveraged for both search & recovery purposes vs a raw data dump.
To access this data you would use Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 Community Edition. This is a free edition of our software that whilst it has restrictions on new backups (maximum of 10 users), it doesn’t have any search or restoration restrictions.
You would maintain the storage and tooling for as long as you required to meet retention commitments. As you wouldn’t be actively backing up any data your VB365 server could remain powered off except for when you needed to patch or perform search/recoveries to cost optimise further. Once you no longer need to retain the historical data, you’d decommission your VB365 server(s), delete your storage, and be done!
For more information on this, check out the Veeam Data Cloud Service Agreement which has a section on data transfers during exit.
