Maintaining control of your data is important even when it’s stored in the cloud. While cloud providers like Office 365 offer services for backup, archiving, and eDiscovery, those services don’t keep you in control of your data or provide the flexibility and responsiveness needed to meet your legal obligations. Fortunately, using Office 365 doesn’t mean you have to give up the full data protection and data classification features available in Enterprise Vault. Here are five reasons you should keep using Enterprise Vault to manage your data in Office 365.
1. Ensure complete preservation of data.
If email isn’t marked for a hold in Office 365, users can delete it. Legal holds in Office 365 can take up to 60 minutes to be applied. Even items that are tagged for litigation hold can be deleted through the Exchange Management console. Office 365 doesn’t fully index data. Large attachments, including any that are bigger than 32MB and Excel files bigger than 4MB, are excluded. With Office 365, you also have to spend more time and money to preserve mailboxes of ex-employees.
2. Faster and more thorough eDiscovery searches.
Searching a large number of mailboxes in Office 365 is slow. Plus, the Office 365 search doesn’t include blind recipient and distribution lists unless the email is on hold. There’s one more important point to consider: eDiscovery in Office 365 can only search emails. Veritas Enterprise Vault can archive and search content from more than 80 different sources.
3. Avoid vendor lock-in and add-on charges.
Relying on Microsoft for eDiscovery means your email has to stay in Office 365. For full searchability, your complete email archives, as well as active email, needs to be migrated to Office 365. This leaves you vulnerable to high migration costs and to Microsoft’s pricing model, which has additional charges for classification, optical character recognition, and exporting data. Even if you don’t migrate all your archives to Office 365, there’s considerable administration time needed to monitor recoverable mailboxes and disk usage. And by using Enterprise Vault, you have a copy of your data outside of Office 365, ensuring you’ll always have access to it.
4. Give end-users access to archived content.
Enterprise Vault enables end-users to have direct, self-serve access to their archived messages. Without the need for an IT ticket, access is timely and productive.
5. Understand your data better.
With Veritas‘ classification engine, you’ll get a better, deeper understanding of your organization’s data. Analytics enable you to identify relationships and information trends. With this insight, you’re able to design an intelligent data management strategy that preserves and controls only the relevant data. Classification makes it possible to apply granular policies across email, social media, and other files.
To learn more about using Enterprise Vault and Office 365 together, read Part two. Or contact dcVAST and talk to us about the ways Enterprise Vault can help you meet your legal obligations whether your email server is in your data center or in the cloud.
