While managing inactive data in a legally defensible way is a priority for HR, IT and legal teams, it puts a strain on IT, both financially and in resources.

Additional license costs and the increased privacy risks result in costly eDiscovery. Deleting the data too quickly with no means to access critical information risks failed regulatory compliance mandates as data is often needed for a number of years for effective case management and litigation. Vendor delays and inflexibility in extracting the data are inevitable to deter users from leaving.

When Arctera split from Veritas last year, it came as no surprise that adjustments were made to the pricing model. Licensing was previously based on the number of current, live mailboxes being archived. However, inactivity has been redefined where “Inactive User” means users with zero items in their archive, requiring all departed users with archived content to maintain a license. Previously, there was no separate fee. As a result, organisations are considering the options of migrating legacy archived content away from Arctera to alternative platforms. The impact of increased costs is considerable for large organisations with extensive legacy archives. In addition, adaptations in journaling practices imply that each internal recipient of a journaled email may need their own license, potentially multiplying licensing requirements for organisations relying on the feature. Journal data is spread throughout the journal archive and selectively removing it is technically challenging. Journal clients are seeing this as an opportunity to review their email archiving strategy and investigate migrating their journal archives to a more cost-effective platform.

We have seen this practice of charging for inactive user data already with Google Vault. Customers retain email for significant lengths of time to comply with corporate policy and meet regulatory requirements through eDiscovery processes. Emails associated with live, current users as well users who have left the company are required.

For businesses using Google Vault for long term archiving, each user has their own vault. Should a person leave, their vault is likely to be retained for compliance. Over time, organisations maintain a number of vaults associated with live users and leavers. 

Google hadn’t charged for inactive user vaults but have changed their policy leading to huge cost increases that hadn’t been budgeted. For one of our clients, their cost increase was estimated at hundreds of thousands of pounds.