But surely the research data isn't stored on a personal onedrive folder. I mean what happenes if the researcher resigns, the university loses the data?
MS have done a good job of tying everything into a big entangled system where it's hard to disentangle any of the "on prem" products like windows and office offline from the cloud backend used by office365, and a lot of this is introduced gradually with standard(often security critical) updates it gets used without a lot of policy.
You can backup the office365 data elsewhere(were using aws s3 buckets for office365 backups where i work) but that's not cheap nor particularly easy to do and the need to do so is often overlooked when the contract for o365 is signed.