PST files are still causing serious security, productivity, and compliance challenges for organisations, with the risks of near impossible eDiscovery procedures leading to hefty fines.

By eliminating PSTs for good, data security, enhanced user productivity and effective eDiscovery is possible. Compliance risks are mitigated, and IT workload and costs significantly reduced.

Enormous Search Costs

If data is held in PST files, it’s essentially off the grid, not searchable by centralised IT, and can easily be deleted by users. Compliance teams may not even know it exists.

Organisations need greater user transparency to eliminate legal and compliance risks. They often have significant volumes of unmonitored PSTs that have been created by users and stored throughout the IT infrastructure, on laptops, desktops, and removable disks. Furthermore, because of their offline nature, they are often difficult to keep track of, leading to a mass of key corporate email data being stored without any real insight from the company. 

Even if PST files are identified, searching across their contents can be a tedious, manual process, resulting in extended timelines and huge, unavoidable costs.

Litigation & Compliance Risks

PST files enable violation of the email retention policies required by specific regulations, risking compliance failures and the increasing risk of litigation. Improperly protecting sensitive and confidential data, with users saving email data for either a shorter or a longer time than required can violate compliance mandates.

Employees might save or make copies of personal and confidential information within PST files which could be accidentally or deliberately leaked.

Sensitive business information could include intellectual property, Personal Identifiable Information (PII) or confidential information pertaining to a customer. If this data is compromised by one of the numerous cyber-attacks that businesses are relentlessly subjected to, the implications could be severe, particularly given the GDPR requirements on reporting data breaches.

Data breaches caused by PST files can irrevocably damage a company’s reputation, affecting consumer confidence, and could result in hefty fines.

GDPR & Freedom of Information Requests

If an organisation is on the receiving end of litigation, eDiscovery or a Freedom of Information request, it needs to be able to surface the relevant data quickly and be sure that it has not been altered or tampered with in any way.

Legislation such as GDPR is one thing, but many industries are also heavily regulated with compliance monitored by industry watchdogs. 

Having no centralised management, a lack of enforceable retention policies, an insecure format, and a high probability that they contain sensitive information, PSTs are highly likely to fail a GDPR compliance test.

Litigation Readiness

Subject Access Requests (SARs) are now being weaponised in lawsuits to improve settlements. The high cost to search for PII on devices not visible to IT is prohibitive and eDiscovery often impossible within set deadlines.

Organisations can improve litigation readiness if they can find and present evidence quickly, accurately, and in a form acceptable to the courts. Email archiving solutions can reduce litigation costs and protect against frivolous lawsuits as the data preserved is immutable with an intact audited chain of custody. Compliance teams can pull up data quickly for electronic evidence.

Accurate and fast eDiscovery with an in-built workflow to support internal legal reviews can help case management.

Risk of data loss

PST files are rarely backed up and prone to corruption. Users can accidentally delete the file data, requiring considerable time from an overburdened IT department to try to recover it.

Unlike data in a mailbox on the server, PSTs cannot be shared between multiple devices — so users may not be able to access the data they need to do their jobs. Or it could simply be lost altogether, incurring high costs if it’s business critical or required for litigation.

High Storage Costs

With the uncontrolled nature of PST files, organisations often find multiple copies of the same PST littered around infrastructure, with each copy possibly being backed up on a daily basis.

PST Discovery & Migration

What used to be a complex, near impossible task to discover PST files and take control of their contents, can now be simplified through a combination of specialist tools and technical solutions.

To eliminate the risk of PST files, greater control and understanding of the data stored is essential. PST discovery gives a clear indication of the size of the issue. Reports outline the size and location of the files along with further useful metadata, including ownership and the last accessed date. 

Using flexible reports, organisations can make key decisions on the most appropriate course of action for each one.  This may include the deletion of some PST files or the migration of the PST content into a secure, centralised repository - such as Office365 or email archive. 

Key Benefits of PST Migration

The migration of PST files to a hosted archive adds encryption and security to data. With no data stored on personal storage devices, the risk of it being lost or stolen is limited.

• Control and accessibility

An archiving solution gives IT departments greater access and control over data and its use. IT administrators can stop users from creating further PST files and storing data anywhere. 

• eDiscovery

A concise and clear archive solution will consolidate the data held, enabling it to be easily and quickly searched for future eDiscovery or Subject Access Requests.  

PST Discovery & Migration in Practice

Our client, a 6500-user organisation in the regulated, finance sector believed that users were using PST files for local storage management reasons.  They were concerned that the scale of PST usage and their understanding of what corporate data was ‘hidden’ in these files was unclear.

With over 10,000 endpoint devices across over 20 global locations, we were able to:

• Identify the number and size of PST files across the estate
• Report on PST file usage and ownership
• Work with our client on defining an appropriate action plan for each PST

Following the discovery of approximately 64 million business emails in PST files and having defined the appropriate migration strategy, data was migrated to a centralised repository (Microsoft365).  Once in the target platform the data was:

• Stored securely
• Subject to corporate retention policies
• Easily and quickly searchable for SAR and other eDiscovery requests