1437 - Seat management: key terms

Seat

A seat refers to a unique user ID (e.g. email) with one or more backup accounts under a single backup product (i.e. M365, Google Workspace, or Salesforce). Broadly speaking, a seat is a unique user whose data we have backed up.

Currently, seats are used for Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and Salesforce. For Microsoft 365, seats apply to Exchange and OneDrive only. SharePoint sites and Teams teams do not contribute to the seat count, although they do contribute to the total data protected and therefore to the aggregated fair use. Google Workspace seats apply to Gmail, Google Drive, Contacts, Calendar, and Classroom, but not to shared drives.

Shared mailbox (Microsoft 365)

A shared mailbox is a unique user ID (seat) that has only one backup account. If the corresponding OneDrive of a shared mailbox is also backed up to Redstor (i.e. the user ID has more than one backup account), the mailbox is considered a seat like any other.

Shared drive (Google Workspace)

A Google shared drive is a unique user ID (seat) that has only one backup account. If the corresponding Gmail mailbox is also backed up to Redstor (i.e. the user ID has more than one backup account), the drive is considered a seat like any other.

Active/inactive (seat or shared mailbox/drive)

A seat (or shared mailbox/drive) is considered active if at least one of its accounts is backing up. A seat is inactive when a backup account for it exists, but is no longer backing up. A seat can become inactive in one of four ways:

• The customer deselects the seat from both Exchange and OneDrive backup sets.
• The licence for the seat (e.g. M365 E1 licence) is removed by the customer. (Read more about supported licences here.)
• The seat is deleted from the customer's Azure Active Directory.
• The seat's account is selected for backup, but is not accessible, or when scanned is found to contain no data. (Our system will periodically check if this has changed and the account can be backed up again.)

Fair use policy (FUP)

A company's fair use policy (FUP) limit for a base product (i.e., M365, Google Workspace, or Salesforce) is calculated as (active product seats + inactive product seats) * seat FUP. The seat FUP limit is 50GB. For example, for Microsoft 365, fair use is measured against the total of: data protected in Exchange + data protected in OneDrive + data protected in SharePoint + data protected in Teams.

Shared mailboxes (Microsoft 365) and shared drives (Google Workspace) do not count as seats, but their data contributes to the total data protected. If a FUP limit is exceeded, the customer is billed for each additional GB protected.