Compliance Migration

Migrating Journal Archives to Office 365 may present a compelling case for some but there are several points to consider.  As Office 365 does not support legacy journal archive data in a traditional sense the data must either be split into thousands of mailboxes, or to optimally conform to Microsoft standards, exploded back to individual mailbox archives. 

Splitting to shared mailboxes is absolutely supported, it’s a fine line whether Microsoft may support and/or introduce additional cost around this methodology in future.  With the data explosion methods comes the issue that it pushes individual user mailbox limits and may result in some key metadata being lost.  

Additionally, the process shift may be a significant change for legal teams in general and in order to have the best feature set you will need to use Advanced eDiscovery, which comes at a significant bump in cost. 

Whether an organization is considering a Cloud Archive solution, already leveraging one, or experienced the challenges of moving large pools of business data in between, planning ahead to avoid a painful future transition is an ideal goal.  Some Cloud Archive solutions charge for bulk inbound data, most charge for bulk outbound.  

Both are quite costly, however bulk outbound charges are often used as a lock-in method potentially holding data hostage in a solution that the business deems no longer viable.  In this situation, it is critical to have a strategy to ensure control of your data and technology flexibility. 

IBM reported that data breaches in 2020 cost organizations an average of $3.9M and the average amount of time to identify the breach and contain it was 280 days.  Aside from unstructured data stored on USB and thumb drives, no other data typically poses such a risk as unmanaged PST files in your organization.  

Leveraged for decades by end-users to extend their mailbox, PST files present a major risk to enterprise organizations including loss of intellectual property, data leakage & breaches, non-compliance with corporate data retention policies, and the inability to quickly respond to legal discovery requests.