Like hundreds of other Micro Focus customers, you want to migrate your Digital Safe archive. In the past, Micro Focus Digital Safe was all you needed for collecting, archiving and reviewing your emails, facilitating eDiscovery, and maintaining compliance with regulations like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP), the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Securities and Exchange Commission Rules (SEC Rule 17a-4 & Rule 17a-3). Today, however, you’re likely discovering that it’s not able to keep up with changing markets, regulations, content types, and new customer demands.
You may be one of the many Digital Safe customers frustrated by slow performance, your inability to support new content types, or lack of reporting and analytics features. With additional new file formats, from social media and instant messaging to audio and video files, legacy archiving solutions like Digital Safe simply aren’t up to the task.
Legacy archiving tools like Digital Safe were designed for a business world before the more restrictive regulatory retention requirements. Legacy archiving solutions just haven’t kept pace with the times, forcing customers to either ignore the new regulations or create risky, unapproved workarounds. With a lack of support or obsolescence on the horizon for many of these traditional archives, the next step is clear; you need to migrate to a modern, customizable PaaS cloud archive.
You’ll likely already appreciate the many benefits the right cloud-based archive could bring to your business. Such solutions provide a way not only to handle all of your historical archiving needs but to unlock many new opportunities while providing flexibility and scalability as your needs shift and your organization grows. However, In order to benefit from the many features a modern cloud-based archive offers, you must first find a way to migrate your Digital Safe archive in a legally defensible manner without the risk of data corruption, leaving data behind, negatively impacting ongoing operations and end-user productivity, or damaging chain of custody.
In simple terms, there are three routes available to you when it comes to archiving. You can stick with the aging Micro Focus cloud archive, migrate to Retain (another legacy archiving product acquired by Micro Focus), opt for the simplicity but lack of control of a SaaS (Software as a Service) archiving solution such as Mimecast or Global Relay, or migrate fully to your own cloud tenancy. Assuming options one and two are non-starters, let’s take a look at the other two choices:
While most SaaS vendors promise many of the benefits of the cloud and claim to provide the best turn-key cloud archiving platform, the simplicity they offer comes at the cost of security, access, accountability, and control over your data.
Such solutions, while seemingly simple and cost-effective, will ultimately act as a roadblock between your business and its data, prohibiting you from utilizing many of the best features of cloud-based archiving and limiting how you secure your data. For example, most SaaS vendors don’t own their own cloud but instead merely rent space within an existing public/third-party cloud. This is what’s known as a multi-tenant cloud, and it provides a significant drawback for the client – your encryption keys are controlled by the SaaS vendor with little access and zero control by you. Because encryption keys in a SaaS environment could be re-used across many clients, data breaches, and the associated privacy regulatory risks are much greater. Additionally, this encryption key issue opens up the possibility of unauthorized vendor access to your company’s most sensitive data. This means that the SaaS vendor can access your company’s sensitive data at any time, including the turning over of your data to government authorities or the courts without your knowledge.
Furthermore, as one of many businesses sharing the same cloud, you must adhere to the SaaS vendor’s choices when it comes to security capabilities, the geographic storage location of your data, and the tools available to access it. Put simply, this one-size-fits-all approach robs you of control over your own data and the way it’s secured.
Another issue to be aware of is where the SaaS vendor reformats your data for their own convenience. By converting your data into their proprietary format, the SaaS vendor gains even more control over when and if you can move out of the SaaS cloud if dissatisfied. Your data is stored in what amounts to data prison, with huge charges incurred if you choose to leave. In addition to this data ransoming, you are also unable to make use of the cutting-edge solutions state of the art cloud computing delivers, such as powerful data analytics capabilities or ML (Machine Learning) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) technology to provide content-based auto-classification for accurate information management. Such restrictions can undermine your decision to move to the cloud in the first place, to deliver digital transformation, and should be considered carefully in the context of your business and its future plans. Ultimately, when it comes to content archiving, SaaS solutions create many challenges, especially regarding security and flexibility, and offer minimal advantages by comparison to the various hyperscale cloud offerings, with little to no improvement over your current on-premises infrastructure.
Elsewhere, on the topic of encryption keys, an astounding 95% of survey 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 continues to grow. To that end, 92% of executives said they would need more security customization in the future, with 63% of them planning to retire SaaS applications that didn’t provide them control over encryption keys.
These security-related statistics paint a clear picture of the business security landscape and the risk that the one-size-fits-all approach of SaaS vendors introduces. As the trend for greater security customization continues and scrutiny over data access and handling increases, SaaS solutions will become increasingly less palatable for businesses aiming to de-risk their operations. Instead, more secure and customizable solutions will be sought.
Archive360 offers the premier email archive migration solution designed specifically to work with Micro Focus Digital Safe. Fully integrated with Micro Focus Digital Safe APIs for faster, more accurate extractions, Archive360 extracts messages and attachments including metadata directly from Micro Focus Digital Safe. We maintain an item-level audit trail for compliance reporting and preserve complete, original message fidelity for eDiscovery and regulatory compliance.
Read our product brochure to learn how Archive360 provides end-to-end fully managed solution to upend migration failures.
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