This is a great time for your organization to do some much-needed spring cleaning of your on-premises IT inventory, starting with your Veritas Enterprise Vault email archive. Whether you’ve already migrated to the cloud, have plans to migrate, or are still running Enterprise Vault in your on-premises data center or in the cloud, this MVP Guide provides you with the resources to help you make an informed decision.
If you’re an existing Veritas Enterprise Vault user or are planning on migrating your legacy Enterprise Vault archive to Veritas Enterprise Vault.cloud, it would be well worth taking a step back and considering alternatives. Whether your goal was to comply with a wide range of regulatory retention requirements, react to eDiscovery in a legally defensible manner, meet business policies for email retention, or simply reduce the strain on your data center, back in the day Enterprise Vault was the most popular email archiving solution. But with the ever-changing compliance laws and eDiscovery responsibilities, the Veritas Enterprise Vault archive you have been relying on for many years is simply no longer is up to the task.
Regardless of whether you’re using an on-premises or first-generation cloud-based version of Enterprise Vault, you will definitely have noticed that it has fallen behind in addressing today’s regulatory, legal, and business requirements. In addition, like many Veritas Enterprise Vault customers, you’re no doubt concerned about the cost and potential risk to your business of maintaining this increasingly archaic technology.
Click on any chapter to jump directly to it.
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 1
Whether you’ve already moved to the cloud and are still maintaining your on-premises Veritas Enterprise Vault email archive or have already moved and are leaving your legacy archive in place for ongoing journaling, there’s a high cost associated with your decision. Simply put, by maintaining on-premises computing and storage infrastructure, you’re investing increasing capital in an aging platform that doesn’t meet your current requirements and won’t in the future.
A recent Osterman Research white paper provided the following findings…
Enterprise Vault itself only will cost more every year as the diagrams below show. Draining funds through software and hardware support, labor and power demands, the increasing total cost of ownership only further makes the case for a cloud-based archiving solution.
Chapter 2
With cloud-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions, organizations use and pay for exactly what they need, not paying for future estimated requirements, providing obvious savings. But, with Enterprise Vault, your archives are stuck languishing on servers that you pay support costs to maintain and run. No doubt you would jump at the chance to only pay for what you use, which is what makes the cloud such an attractive prospect. Better still, those organizations that adopt a “pay as you go” (Operational Expenses - OpEx) model are able to engage the resources and expertise of cloud hosting experts to take advantage of new capabilities faster without the needed investments, and realize cost benefits throughout the year.
It seems like a no-brainer. You’re aware you should move away from aging solutions like Enterprise Vault and you know the cloud is the place to be. But what are your options?
Essentially, there are three possible strategies:
With that in mind, we can safely say that the first strategy doesn’t make sense for most companies. So, let’s take a look at the two remaining possible strategies open to you: the halfway house versus the flexible, future-proof solution.
Chapter 3
SaaS archiving platforms have been around for a while now, with legacy vendors like Veritas (as well as others like Smarsh, Mimecast and GlobalRelay) making use of the SaaS model to deliver one-size-fits-all archiving solutions. In the early days of SaaS, cloud solutions such as these had some major selling points and they were the only cloud solutions available. They helped businesses to do away with ongoing on-premises infrastructure costs in favor of a convenient subscription service that required little input on their part. The problem is, they weren’t designed to be flexible or compatible with the true, hyperscale cloud requirements of today.
With “agility” and “flexibility” key buzzwords in technology over the last few years, this obvious limitation quickly highlighted the apparent problem. As the world rapidly changes, especially in relation to technology and data security, SaaS-based archives aren’t designed or equipped to cope with shifting regulations and constantly emerging security threats, or the need for businesses to scale up and down based on business requirements, as the hyperscale cloud is.
While SaaS solutions might once have been the easiest or only way to go, their static feature sets and one-size-fits-all design restrictions now limit security, access, accountability, and direct control over your data.
Most SaaS-based archiving vendors will tell you they offer the best turn-key cloud archiving platform but, in reality, they only introduce the same issues you experience with legacy on-premises infrastructure, such as the lack of an easy way to harness analytics, Machine Learning, and AI. In other words, the SaaS “lowest-common-denominator” design and architecture cannot meet today's needs.
Sharing your cloud with others
Many SaaS issues stem from a basic drawback of the model – the fact that most SaaS-based archiving vendors don’t own their own datacenters. Instead, they rent space in what’s called a multi-tenant cloud. In reality, the SaaS vendor is subletting their cloud tenancy to you and offer a single application hundreds of other companies.
Not only does this situation block the addition of new much-needed capabilities, but it also raises major security concerns. For instance, that fact that as a customer, you don’t have control of the encryption keys used to secure your data. This, coupled with a lack of control over the security processes and measures in place, means your company’s data could be inadvertently shared with all of the SaaS vendor’s other clients in the same multi-tenant cloud. That significantly increases the chances of unauthorized access i.e. viruses and ransomware, data corruption, or deletion. It also means the SaaS vendor can access your company’s sensitive data at any time or provide access to government agencies via secret subpoenas – without you ever knowing.
Vendor Data Ransom
While security is a major issue for all organizations, subscription costs and total cost of ownership is always a close second in importance. Most SaaS vendors will convert and store your company’s files in their own proprietary format that only their tools can access, essentially creating what amounts to a data prison. When you want to eventually move your data somewhere else, the vendor can charge you huge “reconversion fees” to move your data away from their service. On top of this data ransoming, the proprietary format also means you can’t use your data with AI or Machine Learning technology to provide content-based auto-classification and supervision for more accurate information management.
Before you consider a migration to Enterprise Vault.cloud, we suggest you check with the vendor:
Chapter 4
In a recent survey of global IT executives, including VPs, Directors, and members of the C-suite at major corporations, only 19% of those surveyed believed 75% or more of their SaaS vendors met all their security requirements. 70% stated they had been forced to make at least one security exception for a SaaS vendor. While many of these organizations are likely using popular SaaS products like Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce, where the size and standing of the vendor might make the business more amenable to accepting a perceived lower risk, the clear takeaway is that many SaaS solutions don’t provide the security standards and flexibility modern organizations require.
On the topic of encryption keys, an astounding 95% of respondents believed it was important to control their own encryption keys, and 81% were uncomfortable with their SaaS vendors controlling them. However, 74% of those surveyed said they did not control the encryption keys for the majority of their SaaS solutions. This is a worrying statistic and one that many organizations will have to take steps to reverse as regulations continue to tighten and the threat of cybercrime grows. To that end, 92% of executives said they would require more security customization in the future, with 63% of them planning to retire current SaaS applications that don’t provide them control over encryption key creation and management.
These statistics paint a clear picture of the security landscape and the risk that the one-size-fits-all approach of SaaS vendors introduces. As the trend for security customization continues and scrutiny over data access and handling increases, SaaS solutions will become increasingly less palatable for organizations’ risk mitigation efforts. Instead, more secure and customizable solutions will be a major focus.
Chapter 5
There is a way to retain complete control over your sensitive archived data while applying your own security standards and protocols. To achieve this, you must migrate your legacy archive data (whether it’s current on-premises or in the cloud) to an archive hosted and managed in your own hyperscale cloud tenancy.
The best known names in this space are, of course, Microsoft and Amazon. Coupling the power of their hyperscale clouds with the right PaaS-based information management and archiving solution will provide you with complete control over your data, with files stored in their native format, and best-in-class security and data management features included. Not only that, but you are also free to harness cloud-scale AI and Machine Learning to unlock crucial business insight from your data, plus automate data management and handling for accurate supervision, predictive surveillance, auto-classification, and eDiscovery response. This is the modern cloud in all its glory, offering a wide-ranging set of essential, future-proof features that SaaS archives simply can’t match.
Your own hyperscale cloud should give you…
All cloud archives are not created equal. There are major differences between archives deployed in a SaaS model versus a PaaS model that affect the security, accessibility and functionality of your archived data. This Technical Guide explores what you will need to consider in order to make an informed decision about PaaS versus SaaS.
Features | SaaS Archives | Open Archive |
Infrastructure | ||
Host data in your corporate cloud | ||
Security | ||
Protect Data with encryption keys | ||
Compliance | ||
Meet SEC 17a-4 regulations | ||
Meet GDPR Regulations | Limited | |
Policy-driven records | Limited | |
Compliant onboarding | ||
Performance | ||
Active user-based pricing | ||
Management | ||
Standard eDiscovery with case management | ||
AI-powered eDiscovery | ||
Manage any content/data type | Limited | |
Records analysis, classification and management | Limited | |
Policy-driven records classification and transformation | ||
Data Loss Prevention and sensitive data analysis alerts | ||
Export and produce data for third party consumption | ||
Role-based access with Active Directory Integration | Limited | |
Native import and export with O365, SharePoint Online and OneDrive | Limited | |
Onboarding | ||
Accelerated onboarding at 50 TB per day | ||
Restore legacy archives back to native format | ||
Pricing | ||
Active user-based pricing | ||
Interactive Users - free of charge (restrictions apply) |
Chapter 6
If you’ve made up your mind to move to a new, more capable cloud platform, one of your first considerations will be what to do with the terabytes or even petabytes of data stored in your legacy EV archive. The answer is to find a partner to help you migrate that data quickly, seamlessly, in a legally defensible manner, and painlessly to the new cloud without the risk of leaving any of it behind, losing it in route, or interrupting the day-to-day operations of your business.
There a many companies offering such a service, including QuadroTech and Transvault, but the key is to find the best high performance and secure email migration tool for your needs. A tool that is capable of not only moving your data to the cloud at the highest possible speed, but one that ensures the migration is complete, accurate, and legally defensible - which includes protecting the chain of custody.
As you make a decision on your migration partner, you should also think about whether you want to archive or journal in your new cloud. Whether you wish to move your existing archived data to Office 365, another email archive, or to an archive hosted in your company’s own hyper-scale cloud tenancy, Archive360 can help.
Our combination of experience and cloud-based automation is going to make you look really good.
We interviewed 1,100 customers to learn what they loved and hated about their legacy archive and used that insight to create a completely new kind of archive platform.
Chapter 7
Data repositories are growing larger, more complex, and more wide-ranging by the day for every organization. This is coupled with an increasingly stringent regulatory and legal climate, with new, stricter regulatory retention requirements being added every year.
The chances are your organization must either comply with the financial services industry’s very prescriptive SEC 17, FINRA, and MiFID II requirements, have a legal need to ensure ongoing litigation hold requirement of specific custodian data, or want to conduct targeted internal investigations.
The need to capture, immutably store, index/make searchable, audit, and export (with all metadata intact) has radically expanded beyond everyday email. Your compliance journals may need to include content from collaboration platforms like Bloomberg Chat, Slack, Salesforce , social media platforms, Microsoft Teams, and many other sources.
Migrating a legacy Enterprise Vault journal in a legally defensible manner is not easy and should only be done by those with a long history of experience and success. Some migration vendors will tell you that “exploding” or “splitting” journals so that they can be inserted into Office 365 is the best process. Microsoft frowns on this practice and instead suggests that the legacy journals and ongoing journal streams from Office 365 be migrated into another third-party cloud archive. Some companies have chosen to migrate their journals into a SaaS cloud infrastructure but with the issues already highlighted with SaaS clouds, the better choice is to move them into your own, company-controlled cloud tenancy.
Chapter 8
Archive360 understands how big a decision it is to move to the hyperscale cloud and appreciates the many concerns you might have. Having carried out over a thousand successful legacy archive migrations, we’re well aware of the questions you need answers to and are able to dispel your fears in our initial discussions. The conversations we have at the start of a migration normally include answering questions like…
Archive360 offers the most trusted archive and legacy data migration solution available - specifically designed for the Enterprise Vault archive. Fully integrated with the solution’s APIs for faster, more accurate data extractions, Archive360 extracts messages and attachments, including all metadata, directly from the archive, and maintains an item-level audit trail for compliance and legal reporting (chain of custody). It also preserves complete, original message fidelity for eDiscovery and regulatory information requests.
Archive360 provides the cloud archive and information management platform trusted most by enterprises and government agencies worldwide, purpose-built to run in the hyperscale cloud. Installed and run from your organization’s individual public cloud tenancy, you retain all the power, flexibility, and management capability while maintaining complete control of your data and its security, including encryption keys that only you have access to. Additionally, unlike on-premises and SaaS archiving solutions, you are free to unlock valuable insights via data analytics and carry out powerful searches on your data using the latest cloud-based tools that will benefit multiple teams across your business, from HR to legal and compliance.
Read our product brochure to learn how Archive360 provides end-to-end fully managed solution to upend migration failures.
READ MOREThis document explores the differences between the two platforms and what to consider in order to make an informed decision about PaaS vs SaaS.
LEARN MOREWhy you should turn on Office 365 archiving for your business (and how to make the most of it if you already have).
LEARN MOREWe explore the definitions of the two strategies and then dig deeper into the numbers that layout the true cost of ownership (TCO) of moving to the cloud.
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