This is a great time for your organization to do some much-needed spring cleaning of your on-premises IT inventory, starting with your 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 thinking about your options. 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 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 Enterprise Vault customers, you’re no doubt concerned about the cost and potential risk to your business of maintaining this increasingly archaic technology.
Whether you’ve already moved to the cloud and are still maintaining your on-premises Enterprise Vault 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Read our product brochure to learn how Archive360 provides end-to-end fully managed solution to upend migration failures.
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This document explores the differences between the two platforms and what to consider in order to make an informed decision about PaaS vs SaaS.
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Why you should turn on Office 365 archiving for your business (and how to make the most of it if you already have).
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We 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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