Organisations have increasingly decided it’s their preferred option, often as an alternative to specialist email archiving platforms such as Mimecast or Dell EMC SourceOne (reaching end of life in 2024).
In the latest Gartner* report on enterprise information archiving, customers explained their reasons for selecting Google Vault, citing the pros and cons:
What do you like most?
- the simplicity of search and retrieval of email or documents when a user has lost track of a file or accidentally deleted it.
- responding to data governance queries - we have learnt to refine our searches so that DSAR requests can be produced without having to sift enormous amounts of data or passing the task onto non-governance staff.
- IT can assist with the searching but easily delegate the retrieval, sifting and decision-making to governance functions.
- set retention parameters easily - although it is not so easy to implement the retention policy because, to be effective, you have to organise information by label and manage retention based on this in order to avoid unintentional loss of legitimate archival data.
What do you dislike most?
- Some approaches to searching - for example when searching across an entire email domain - has to be filtered such as by organisational unit (OU). This is presumably for efficiency, but it can be clunky.
- Improvements could be made in linking the vault retention to methods for linking this to information in Mail and Drive and showcasing this in the Vault UI.
Users beware!
At the time of the report, Google hadn’t announced that a charge for inactive mailboxes would be levied and how these charges can have a significant impact on costs for organisations that use Google Vault for compliance and eDiscovery and have data retention requirements.
The cost implications – a customer scenario
Organisations often need to retain email for significant periods of time due to corporate policy or regulatory requirements. It often requires all email to be retained for a number of years and includes emails associated with live, current users as well as users who have left the company.
For businesses using Google Vault for long term email archiving, each user has their own vault. Should a person leave the company, their vault is likely to be retained for compliance reasons. Over time, it is common for an organisation to maintain a number of vaults associated with live users as well as a large number associated with leavers.
Previously, Google did not levy a charge for inactive, leavers’ vaults but in a change in policy, this no longer appears to be the case. Based on feedback from our clients, Google is now charging them for inactive vaults, leading to significant cost increases that have not been budgeted for.
In a recent case, our client’s annual costs were estimated to increase by hundreds of thousands of pounds which has made them consider migrating their leaver’s data into an alternate, more cost-effective solution.
Actions our Google clients are considering
Delete leavers’ data
While this may be an option for some organisations, most cannot do this due to corporate data retention policies specifying that all data must be retained for a minimum period.
Move data in leavers’ vaults into a more cost-effective platform
In this option, leavers’ vaults are identified, and the data is extracted from the platform into an ‘open’ format. What organisations do with the data once it is extracted from Google depends on ongoing access requirements. Some clients securely store the extracted email data while others move the content into solutions that enable quicker and more efficient eDiscovery searching.
Google is not alone
Google, however, is not alone in the practice of squeezing existing customers. We have recently seen other email archiving platforms such as Enterprise Vault (EV) introduce charges for inactive users across both mailbox and journal archiving.
For mailbox archiving, similar options exist for clients in terms of data deletion and/or data migration where it is straightforward to identify leavers’ data.
For EV journal clients, leavers’ data will be spread throughout the journal archive and selectively removing this is technically challenging. More clients are seeing this as an opportunity to review their email archiving strategy and investigate migrating their journal archives to an alternate, more cost-effective platform.
At the time of writing, despite historical rumours, Microsoft are yet to follow suit.
*Gartner report