If Office 365 and Google Workspace provide email archiving already, why use a third party email archiver like DataCove?
In our rapidly expanding world of integrated cloud-only platforms like Office 365 and Google Workspace, where all data lives and breathes in their walled gardens, there has been a divide between proponents of keeping all of the data in one place and spreading it out between multiple vendors.
With the core debate often boiling down to the the amalgamation of data being searchable all in one place versus the expense and headache of trying to manage the complexities and regulatory requirements of eDiscovery and compliance within the Microsoft and Google ecosystems, it’s something we’ve heard from many clients on both sides of the battlefield.
Honestly, both sides have merit. With it being such a common question, we’ve figured it best to lay out the reasoning why third party email archivers like DataCove are still thriving despite integrated platforms finally offering email archiving.
License costs:
Licensing isn’t cheap, a fact that larger organizations likely feel the most pain from.
The basic Office 365 license of E1 starts at $10/user/mo and provides the core functions of the platform, but not mid-tier features like email archiving without the add-on license enhancement for another $3/user/mo.
Keeping this apples to apples just for eDiscovery and archival offerings and not including any sort of competition with the Office 365 base suite, $3/user/mo for 100 users is $3,600 annually, a higher price than a comparable annual DataCove subscription by far. Depending on the exact platform chosen for DataCove, Microsoft’s price can be multiple times higher.
Taking it a step further, Microsoft’s E3 licensing is a whopping $23/user/mo and includes their basic eDiscovery platform that gets near to matching DataCove in functionality, but the value breakout is a little harder to quantify given how many other functions come with E3 licensing. While it covers the bare requirements needed for many organizations to meet their eDiscovery requirements, the administrative overheads then come into play, which are discussed below.
For Google’s licensing, their eDiscovery platform, known as Google Vault, is likewise excluded from their low and mid tier subscriptions and requires some of their top end licensing to acquire as part of a bundle. Google does offer add-on licensing for the Vault product, but at a rather steep $5/user/mo, meaning archiving 100 users over the course of one year stacks up to a very painful $6,000 annual bill, which is utterly enormous even in comparison to Microsoft and could purchase multiple years of a comparable DataCove subscription.
Administrative burdens:
For both Microsoft Purview and Google Vault, there are two deficiencies that most of the clients who have used them and come to DataCove are consistently looking to resolve: volatility of data and limited search functionality.
Data volatility, in this context, means the ability to change that data or otherwise delete it without any audit trail indicating as such. For systems that allow for deletion of archived data, including platforms like Office 365 where the archive is simply placing a mailbox on litigation hold regardless of whether there is litigation or not occurring, this can lead to administrative overhead both at time of mailbox creation and deletion. As this is reliant on humans to conduct, there is inevitable human error and mailboxes will get missed, easily knocking an organization out of compliance and risking unnecessary legal exposure. Further, mailboxes under Litigation Hold are still subject to mailbox size constraints and heavy users can find themselves in the unenviable situation of maxing out both their mailbox and online archive and being forced to resort to PST files for storage, which definitely do not meet the non-modifiable compliance requirements for archives.
In terms of Search, like within Microsoft Purview and Google Vault, functionality is fairly limited to just some keywords and mailboxes to sort through; they simply don’t have the decades of experience and design that went into third party dedicated archivers like DataCove, let alone the specificity, depth and variety of advanced search types available.
This translates into far more results appearing under a search than necessary and with consequently more time spent reviewing and redacting by your organization’s legal counsel, and the billable hours therein.
Technical outage concerns and honeypots:
Lastly, there is a growing concern around the sheer scale of Google and Microsoft’s hosting that as more and more organizations move their email hosting to these concentrated platforms, the simple value of attacking them and obtaining access to the data contained within make them an irresistible honeypot. To be able to potentially breach thousands of organizations in a single, advanced attack has kept many high security organizations from making the switch, having instead built up their internal security infrastructure so much over the years that they are comfortable handling their own servers in-house instead.
As a fairly straightforward and recent example, Microsoft announced that the June 5, 2023 service outages were the result of a large scale cyberattack (news story linked below), with previous downtime events over the years likewise being linked to Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks, usually with the intent of disrupting organizations reliant on these platforms for their services, but also as a cover for data theft.
For these scenarios, organizations who have the technical know-how and personnel to maintain their email archives in-house are another area where third party archivers fit the need well. Without having an external reliance on major providers like Microsoft and Google, systems like DataCove can continue to provide access to the email archives even when the such hosts are being impacted by adverse events.
For organizations who don’t want to maintain the system in-house, but also want it kept separate from Microsoft or Google, Tangent also offers hosting of the DataCove system.