Does your organization utilize Office 365 for email? Is your organization required to journal email for compliance, legal, or business requirements? Do your Attorneys complain about the time it takes to find information for an eDiscovery request? If the answer is yes to any of these questions, then keep reading.

With the rising popularity of cloud computing and Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions, data sovereignty issues have become a greater focus and risk for Chief regulatory Officers (CRO) and General Counsels (GC). Data sovereignty is a country-specific requirement that data is subject to the laws of the country in which it is collected or processed and must remain within its borders. Many countries have had these laws for decades, and new privacy laws such as the GDPR are only making them more prominent. For example, countries like Russia, China, Germany, France, Indonesia, and Vietnam (to name a few) require that their citizen’s data must be stored on physical servers within the country’s borders. They argue that it’s in the government’s and their citizen’s interest to protect personal information against any misuse, especially outside of the country’s jurisdiction.

A great deal has been written about the GDPR and CCPA privacy laws, both of which includes a “right to be forgotten.” The right to be forgotten is an idea that was put into practice in the European Union (EU) in May 2018 with the General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR).

Various government privacy regulations, including GDPR, CCPA, various state regulations, and the draft federal privacy bill currently in Congress (the Consumer Data Protection Act) all include some form of the right to data erasure, otherwise known as the right to be forgotten.

The California Consumer privacy Act (CCPA) was passed last year (2018) with an effective date of January 1, 2020 – assuming no federal actions (check out the blog titled “Will the New California Consumer Privacy Act Stand?” for potential federal actions.)  

Over the years I’ve written a lot about the benefits of enterprise file consolidation, i.e., storing and managing unstructured data in a common repository.   In fact, most companies still have data spread around the enterprise in distinct stand-alone data silos (usually unmanaged at the file level) including custodian computers, removable media, personal cloud accounts, file systems, email systems, and SharePoint servers (to name just a few).

Healthcare providers have an ever expanding choice of medical tools to choose from. However, the more medical devices they acquire, the more complex their systems become. Two of the biggest issues healthcare providers face are: Dealing with the variety, volume, velocity, complexity, and non-interoperability of healthcare data Moving disparate data from their individual data silos to a consolidated repository where true value can be realized, i.e., faster, more reliable diagnoses (because providers and their applications have access to the full healthcare data set

Email Journaling in Office 365

The question of whether moving to the cloud has cost advantages over that of staying on premise continues to be discussed in industry publications. Some industry analysts suggest that all things being equal, OpEx strategies should cost more than CapEx… but does it? Lets first briefly 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.

Microsoft has just published an in-depth vendor story on Archive360 titled “Intelligent information management ISV uses Azure to give customers fast, flexible insights at a lower cost.”

Customers tell us that their on premise storage systems are overflowing, causing them to continuously purchase additional, expensive enterprise storage, more floor-space, and hire additional personnel. The solution is straightforward, the cloud.  

Finally, the financial industry is no longer forced into purchasing and supporting overpriced on premise WORM storage or high priced, specialty cloud archives that lock them into the platform with ridiculously high penalties when you want to move your data out.