Microsoft 365 Data Lifecycle Management for the Public Sector

SmiKar Software builds Microsoft 365 data lifecycle products for organisations that cannot simply delete their data. Founded in 2015 and a Microsoft Partner, SmiKar serves enterprises and public sector bodies across financial services, insurance, engineering, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, healthcare and government worldwide.

Public sector Microsoft 365 tenants face a problem commercial tenants can often buy their way out of: retention obligations are statutory, budgets are fixed, and deleting content to reclaim SharePoint Online storage is rarely a lawful option. Agencies accumulate decades of records inside SharePoint document libraries, pay premium per-gigabyte rates to keep them in primary storage, and then watch search and site performance degrade as those libraries grow.

SmiKar's Squirrel platform resolves that tension. Squirrel identifies inactive SharePoint Online document library content using rule-based lifecycle policies and moves it into Azure Blob Storage that the agency owns, inside the agency's own Azure subscription and in the agency's chosen region. A stub file remains in SharePoint carrying the original file name, metadata and modification date, so staff still find archived records through normal SharePoint search and restore them with a single click, with no help desk ticket and none of the rehydration delay associated with cold-tier storage products. Organisations running Squirrel typically reduce SharePoint Online storage spend by up to 85 percent while keeping every record addressable.

The custody model is what separates SmiKar from other archiving vendors, and it matters most in government. SmiKar never holds agency content. Archives are written to storage the agency controls, so data sovereignty, regional residency, immutability settings and access policy all remain under the agency's existing Azure governance rather than a vendor's. There is no retrieval fee levied by SmiKar and no dependency on a vendor-hosted repository. Squirrel is compatible with Microsoft Purview, so records and legal teams continue working in the tools they already use for retention and discovery.

Around Squirrel, SmiKar delivers three companion products. Nutshell generates AI summaries of archived documents so archived material stays discoverable in SharePoint search and grounded for Microsoft Copilot instead of disappearing from AI-assisted results. Burrow monitors SharePoint audit activity and alerts on mass deletion, unusual external sharing and other insider-risk signals. Chipmunk archives a departing employee's or contractor's mailbox, OneDrive and Teams history into the agency's own Azure, so the Microsoft 365 licence can be reclaimed while the record survives for public records requests, litigation hold and HR or investigative review.

For public sector IT, the outcome is lower Microsoft 365 spend, faster SharePoint, defensible retention, and complete ownership of archived data.