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Is Your Legacy Archive Holding You Back in Today’s Cloud-Centric Climate?
Whether you used GWAVA archiving before it was acquired by Micro Focus in 2016 or are using a post-2016 version of the solution, we understand your decision to use it. The simplicity it offered, the convenient regular billing cycle, and a hands-off approach were likely factors that helped make up your mind. But, whether you chose the solution yourself or inherited it, you’re likely now discovering that it’s not able to keep up with the changing markets, emerging regulations, and new demands of your business today.
With on-premises infrastructure becoming more costly to maintain and secure, a growing number of remote workers, the size and volume of emails increasing, and new file formats, from social media and instant messaging to audio and video files being introduced, legacy on-premises servers and SaaS solutions simply aren’t up to the task and are quickly becoming a costly burden for your business. The time has come to look for alternatives and, as is the case for many, corporate digital transformation initiatives such as the adoption of cloud-based tools like Microsoft Office 365 and Gmail make cloud-based archiving a much more attractive prospect.
Legacy archiving solutions, like GWAVA Retain Unified Archiving, OpenText AXS-One Archive and Veritas Enterprise Vault, haven’t kept pace with the times, forcing their developers and customers to create risky (and unproven) workarounds or, in the case of MX Logic and Mimosa NearPoint, drop support altogether. They are tools for a business world before new file formats and the more restrictive and ever-changing regulatory retention requirements of today were introduced. As a user of such legacy solutions, this means your business is or will soon be stuck with unsupported or obsolete technology or be pushed to make a move to a similar SaaS-based system (often with the same or worse restrictions) by the vendor, making PaaS cloud-based archiving even more appealing.
Put simply, if you currently use GWAVA on-premises, there are many issues (outlined below) when it comes to moving to a SaaS-based version like Micro Focus Retain. And, if you’re using a SaaS-based version of GWAVA, you’re likely experiencing many of those issues already and will be forced into considering a move away. Below we’ll cover the ideal alternative to both situations.
Option 1: A SaaS Solution
Most SaaS vendors claim to offer the best turn-key cloud archiving platforms. What they’re really doing is limiting control of your data and blocking you from many of the best features of cloud archiving. Most SaaS archiving vendors don’t own their own datacenters. Instead, they rent cloud space and host multiple customers in it. Even those vendors who do own their own datacenters host multiple customers this way, forcing them to take a one-size-fits-all approach that impacts security and flexibility. This is what’s known as a multi-tenant public cloud, and it provides a significant risk for the client – your encryption keys are controlled by the SaaS vendor and could be used across all of their SaaS clients. Because encryption keys could be re-used among many clients, data breaches and the associated regulatory issues are much greater. A prime example is the privilege escalation attack on Capital One/AWS last year. It also means that the SaaS vendor can access your company’s sensitive data at any time or be forced to hand over your data to government agencies without your knowledge.
With SaaS archiving, you’ll be forced to compromise on your security policies, have little or no control over the geographic location of your data or the ability to store it in more than one location (geo-redundancy). Additionally, because many SaaS vendors convert your files in their proprietary format before archiving, your data is stored in what amounts to a data prison, with the possibility of huge “exit” or data re-conversion charges incurred if you ever want to move your data out of the SaaS cloud platform. On top of this data ransoming, you are also unable to make use of cutting-edge solutions, such as powerful data analytics capabilities or AI and ML technology, to provide content-based auto-classification and supervision for accurate information management.
Ultimately, when it comes to content archiving, SaaS solutions create many negatives, especially regarding security and flexibility, and don’t move you any closer to the true promise of digital transformation.
Common issues with SaaS archiving solutions:
- No access to encryption keys used for your data
- Little to no control over security capabilities
- Proprietary formats limit your ability to move your data
- Limited search options for audio, video and other non-email files
- Little or no control over your data’s geographic location – data sovereignty
- Data analysis and eDiscovery functionality is limited to “lowest common denominator” vendor-provided tools
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 of 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 SaaS solutions don’t provide the security standards modern organizations require.
Elsewhere, 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 regarding data privacy continue to tighten and the threat of cybercrime grows. 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 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 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, such as those in Platform as a Service (PaaS) public cloud, will be sought.
Option 2: Your Own Public Cloud
The only way to ensure complete control over your data and its security, as well as the flexibility to comply with regulations and security policy, is to move to the real hyperscale cloud. A public cloud environment, as provided by Microsoft and Amazon, can provide you with full flexibility, unlimited access to your data, data storage in its native format, and the most advanced and scalable security features and controls.
In a hyperscale cloud-based archive, you can also make use of best of breed cloud-scale AI and ML tools to unlock crucial business insight from your data, as well as focused and accurate supervision, predictive surveillance, and advanced case management and eDiscovery searches. None of this is possible with a SaaS archive, making a clear distinction between an archive hosted in a true hyperscale public cloud that you control, and one hosted in the ‘kinda’ cloud’ offered via SaaS. Ultimately, why would you choose compromise over complete control?
Unlike SaaS or on-premises solutions, the hyperscale cloud provides...
- Immediate access to your data in its native format
- Full control of where data is stored for data sovereignty
- Complete control over security, compliance, and privacy
- Flexibility and on-demand scalability – use only what you need
- Reduced upfront investment and predictable ongoing costs
- No need for legacy infrastructure and ongoing maintenance fees
- Faster, scalable eDiscovery searches and customizable regulatory controls
- Access to the latest AI and ML technology for data classification, mining, and analysis
- The ability to granularly search content within audio, video and social media files
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Multi-Tenant SaaS vs Dedicated SaaS: what you need to know
All cloud archives are not created equal. There are major differences between archives deployed in a dedicated SaaS model versus a multi-tenant 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.
Consider the Need for Journals and Journal Migration
Every organization’s data repositories are growing larger, are more wide-ranging, and increasingly complex every day. Today’s regulatory and legal climates are more intense and stringent than ever before, with new, stricter regulatory retention requirements being added every year. Your organization may have to comply with the financial services industry’s very prescriptive SEC 17, FINRA, and MiFID II requirements, have a legal need to ensure ongoing FRCP-based 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 full metadata and chain of custody intact) has radically expanded beyond just email. Your compliance journals must now include content from collaboration platforms like Bloomberg Chat, Slack, Salesforce activity, social media platforms, Microsoft Teams, and many other sources.
Migrating a legacy GWAVA retain journal in a legally defensible manner is not easy and should only be done by those with a long history of success. Some migration vendors will tell you that “exploding” or “splitting” email journals so that they can be inserted into Office 365 is the correct process. Microsoft frowns on this practice and instead suggests that the intact legacy journals 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/safer/less costly choice is to move them into your own, company-controlled cloud tenancy.
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Archive360 Email Migration Software Product Highlights
Archive360 offers the most trusted email archive migration solution available, specifically designed for GWAVA Retain archives. Fully integrated with the solution’s APIs for faster, more accurate extractions, Archive360 extracts messages and attachments, including all metadata, directly from the GWAVA Retain archive and maintains an item-level audit trail for compliance and legal reporting. It also preserves complete, original message fidelity for eDiscovery and regulatory information requests.
