Document Retention: 6 years is always a solid guess

Overview: Documents need to be retained for specific periods and disposed of at a certain point. 

1. PAYE Records: 3 years after the end of the tax year to which they relate
2. Banking records: 6 years
3. Intellectual Property: 6 years
4. Donations: 3 or 6 years
5. Employment Records: Generally, 6 years
6. Health & Safety Policy: The life of the company and historic versions, previous versions  should be kept for a minimum of ten years
7. Most other Health and Safety Documents: Retain for 6 years if there are updates.
8. Accidents and injuries: at least 3 years from the date of reporting
9. Pension scheme records:  life of Pension scheme +
10. Hazardous waste: 3 years
11. Data Protection Act (personal data): Delete as soon as possible
12. Company Documents

• Key company documents: Articles of Association, certificate of incorporation, memorandum of association, stakeholder official documents,  ...:  retained for the life of the company. 
• Directors' contracts & Directors’  qualifying indemnity provisions:  six years after termination or expiry.
• Annual Budgets, quarterly financial reports, VAT records, Statutory Report and Accounts:  6 years
• Corporation Tax records: 7 years after filing
• Contract for purchase of own shares, labour agreements: 10 years from the buying date
• Property Records: 15 years after expiry

Note: This is my rough guide, as lots of people love talking about Document Retention.

Simple comparison of Cloud Storage options

Azure offers 3 main options for storing files:

Azure File Store (Supports SMB, no version control)

Azure Blob Storage (No SMB, has version control via apis, tiers for archiving)

Azure Data Lake Storage -Gen2 (No SMB, no versioning), more relevant to Big data/DataLake

 

AWS also has options to consider:

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), similar to Azure Blob Storage with an API and tiers

Amazon FSx, similar to Azure File Store, supports SMB and NFS

Amazon Elastic Block Store (ESB) supports NFS

Office 365/SharePoint Archive option:

https://adoption.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365-archive/

Extra SPO/O365 storage costs about $0.20/GB per month, using the SP Achieve service cost 0.05$/TB per month.  Also you only get changed for what you use, no pre-provisioned size.  Security & compliance is maintained so for old data needed to be archive this is a great easy option.