Don't Let Your Legacy Archive Limit Your Business

Your EMC EmailXtender email archive has long been an important component of your business. It helps you to manage storage, facilitate eDiscovery, and maintain 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). But as time, markets, regulations, technology, and customer demands have moved on, legacy solutions like EmailXtender have begun to show their age in the modern world.

EMC EmailXtender joins other legacy on-premises archiving tools like OpenText AXS-One Archive, Enterprise Vault, and GWAVA Retain that have failed to keep up with market demands. Customers are increasingly investigating 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. Migrating from an on-premises archive to the cloud provides a way to not only handle all of your historical archiving needs but to unlock many new opportunities for your business, as well as providing flexibility and scalability as your requirements shift and your organization changes.

Relieve the Pain of On-Premises Infrastructure and Take Control of Your Data

The cloud offers different attractions to different users, but most can agree that freedom from on-premises infrastructure and its associated maintenance and security costs, alongside access to scalable technology and tools that grow with your business, are the major draws of data migration.

From disruptors that were ‘born in the cloud’ to the established players who have become cloud-based in the name of agility and competitive advantage, cloud migration is more a must-have than a nice-to-have in modern business.

In order to benefit from the many opportunities the cloud offers, you must first find a way to move your on-premises legacy archives to the cloud in a legally defensible manner i.e. without the risk of data corruption, leaving data behind, negatively impacting ongoing operations and end-user productivity, or damaging chain of custody. So, what are your options?

99Which Cloud is Right for You?

There are two main options that exist when moving legacy archives to the cloud, but only one of them provides you with the cloud’s true value. First is a Software as a Service (SaaS) archiving solution like Mimecast or Global Relay. While, on the surface, SaaS might seem like the easiest way to go, it does come at the cost of potentially reduced security, access headaches, accountability, and overall control over your data. The second option is to move to your own public cloud tenant, where you can enjoy the full cloud experience without any limits as to how you handle your data or any compromises when it comes to security. 

Option 1: Moving to a SaaS solution

You’ll likely hear SaaS vendors claim they offer the best turn-key cloud archiving platforms but, in reality, they offer little more than an online environment without any of the benefits commonly associated with the cloud. Most SaaS vendors don’t own their own data centers but instead share a portion of a third-party cloud they rent. 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 control by you. Because encryption keys in a SaaS environment could be re-used across many clients, data breaches and the associated regulatory privacy issues are much greater. Additionally, this process opens up the possibility of unauthorized vendor access to your company’s most sensitive data, including the turning over of your data to government authorities or the courts without your knowledge.

journaling background typing

Additionally, 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 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 beware 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 more control over when and if you can move out of the SaaS cloud if dissatisfied. This amounts to sentencing your content to a data prison, with huge charges incurred if you ever want to move your data out of the SaaS cloud platform. In addition to this data ransoming, you are also unable to make use of the cutting-edge solutions 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 as well as impact digital transformation initiatives and should be considered carefully in the context of your business and its future plans. [read more about AI use in information management in this blog]

The Negatives of SaaS Archiving Solutions:

  • Little or no control over your data’s geographic location – data sovereignty
  • Little to no control over security policies 
  • No access or control over encryption keys
  • Proprietary formats limit your ability to move your data 
  • Limited search options for audio, video, and other non-email files 
  • Data analysis and eDiscovery functionality is limited to “lowest common denominator” vendor-provided tools

Believe the SaaS Security Stats

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 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.

61This 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 and frightening 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. 

Option 2: Moving to Your Own Public Cloud Tenancy

For complete control over your sensitive archived data and the ability to apply your own security standards and protocols, the only real choice is to migrate your legacy archive data to the more secure hyperscale cloud. Public, hyperscale clouds, like those from Microsoft and Amazon, can provide you with full flexibility, unlimited access to your data, data storage in its native format, and the most advanced security features and controls.

In a hyperscale cloud-based archive, you can also make use of cloud-scale AI and ML tools to unlock crucial business insight from your data, as well as focused and accurate predictive supervision and surveillance, and e-discovery processing. None of this is possible with a SaaS cloud archive, making a clear distinction between an archive hosted and managed in your own secure cloud tenancy that you directly control, and one hosted in the ‘kinda’ cloud’ offered via SaaS.

With an archive in your own public cloud, you get…

  • 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 – CapEx versus OpEx
  • No need for legacy infrastructure and ongoing maintenance fees
  • Faster, scalable eDiscovery searches and case management, as well as customizable retention /disposition policy, controls for regulatory compliance
  • 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

Archive360 Open Archive vs SaaS Archives

Discover all the benefits of Archive360's Archive2Azure

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)

A Word About Journals and Journal Migration

Every organization’s data repositories are growing larger, are more wide-ranging, and become 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 litigation hold requirements 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 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 EmailXtender 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” 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 choice is to move them into your own, company-controlled cloud tenancy.

Finding the Fastest and Most Accurate Archive Migration Provider

Offering both the widest range of legacy email archive platforms and the most experience in successfully migrating huge data sets, Archive360 provides you with a single point of contact throughout your digital transformation journey, ensuring you understand what is being migrated and how it will be done, while limiting the impact on your network bandwidth and end-user productivity. 

While a number of migration vendors exist, including QuadroTech and Transvault, we believe that the key to successful migrations is a high performance email migration tool that can not only move your data to the cloud at the highest possible speed but ensure the migration is complete, accurate and that chain of custody is maintained. Archive360 can help you analyze your existing legacy archive, organize, rehydrate, and account for email that has been stubbed, determine whether archiving or journaling is the right decision going forward, and migrate your existing legacy data to a cloud-based solution like Office 365 or Azure

Archive Migration

Our combination of experience and cloud-based automation is going to make you look really good.

  • Complete chain-of-custody and exception reporting down to the item level
  • Advanced features for managing your stubs to ensure your end-users experience zero disruption
  • Unique approach to handling journal archives your legal and compliance teams will appreciate
  • Many destination options including Office 365 and dozens of other cloud-based and on-premises archives

Open Archiving

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.

  • More secure: If you don't control your encryption keys, you don't control your data. With our archive, only you have access to your encryption keys.
  • More private: Privacy laws require you to retain data in the region it was created. SaaS archives don't do that. Our archive automatically stores employee and customer data in the country of origin.
  • More insight: Your archive holds incredible insight that until now has been trapped in a black box. Our archive empowers you to extract intelligence from your emails, files and videos for the first time.

Common Questions When Moving Away from EMC EmailXtender

Archive360 appreciates the many concerns organizations have when it comes to migrating their data. With more than a thousand migrations completed successfully, we know the types of questions you need answers to and can help dispel any fears you might have in our initial discussions. Common EMC EmailXtender migration questions we hear include…

  • How much data do I actually have in my archive and what kind of data is it?
  • How much “dark data” do I have (such as archived messages from inactive users and leavers)?
  • Do I need to migrate the entire archive and/or the journal archive?
  • What happens to messages that have been stubbed? 
  • I have ongoing or pending litigation; can I still migrate my mail?
  • How do I manage archived email that is under legal hold? What special handling is needed to maintain chain of custody?
  • Will I be able to account for 100% of my archived mail?
  • How long will the migration take?
Learn More

Archive360 Email Migration Software Product Highlights

Archive360 offers the most trusted email archive migration solution available, specifically designed for EMS EmailXtender archives. 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. Email stubs are rehydrated with the archived emails using a patented technology that ensures all stub metadata is recovered and recombined with the message ensuring full legal defensibility. It also preserves complete, original message fidelity for eDiscovery and regulatory information requests.

Archive360 EMC EmailXtender Migration Detail:

  • Utilizes a multi-threaded, multi-server architecture
    Provides the highest performance and accuracy of all migration solutions
  • Uses native EMS EmailXtender Archive Web APIs
    Enables search and filtering of emails by custodian, date range, and other criteria
  • Does not require indexing or data gathering before extraction
    Begin message extraction within minutes of installation unlike other solutions that take days or weeks to index before project start
  • Message level chain of custody reporting
    Legally defensible reporting reduces eDiscovery risk
  • Intuitive and powerful graphical user interface
    Less time needed for training – faster time to migration

Find out more about Archive360’s unique approach to delivering successful, pain-free migration.

The Cloud Archive Organizations Trust

Archive360 provides the cloud archive trusted by enterprises and government agencies worldwide, purpose-built to run in the hyperscale cloud. Installed and run from your organization’s individual public cloud, you retain all the power, flexibility, and management 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.

Archive Migration Connectors

Archive360 has successfully helped more than 2,000 customers extract data from 20+ enterprise archives, legacy applications, and file system repositories, including the following:
(click on the link for more information)