Veritas / Symantec Enterprise Vault Alternatives & Migration [MVP Guide]

Whether you’ve already moved to the cloud and are still maintaining your on-premises Veritas Enterprise Vault email archive or have already moved and are leaving your legacy archive in place for ongoing journaling, there’s a high cost associated with your decision. Simply put, by maintaining on-premises computing and storage infrastructure, you’re investing increasing capital in an aging platform that doesn’t meet your current requirements and won’t in the future.

Paying the Price for On-Premise Archives Like Veritas/Enterprise Vault

A recent Osterman Research white paper provided the following findings…

• Enterprise Vault is a capable on-premise platform for archiving various types of content, including email, SharePoint data, file shares, etc.
• Keeping your on-premises EV archiving solution active while you are moving the rest of your data center to the cloud does not fit with your digital transformation strategy.
• Enterprise Vault is relatively expensive compared to many alternatives, particularly those in the cloud.

Enterprise Vault itself only will cost more every year as the diagrams below show. Draining funds through software and hardware support, labor and power demands, the increasing total cost of ownership only further makes the case for a cloud-based archiving solution.

With cloud-based Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions, organizations use and pay for exactly what they need, not paying for future estimated requirements, providing obvious savings. But, with Enterprise Vault, your archives are stuck languishing on servers that you pay support costs to maintain and run. No doubt you would jump at the chance to only pay for what you use, which is what makes the cloud such an attractive prospect. Better still, those organizations that adopt a “pay as you go” (Operational Expenses - OpEx) model are able to engage the resources and expertise of cloud hosting experts to take advantage of new capabilities faster without the needed investments, and realize cost benefits throughout the year.

It seems like a no-brainer. You’re aware you should move away from aging solutions like Enterprise Vault and you know the cloud is the place to be. But what are your options?

Essentially, there are three possible strategies:

1. Stick with what you have and continue to be limited by an on-premises solution like Enterprise Vault.
   As you continue on with your cloud transition strategy, while maintaining your on-premise EV infrastructure, you’ll quickly realize the competitive disadvantage you are in.
2. Move your Veritas Enterprise Vault email archives to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) archiving solution in the “kinda’ cloud”
   Because they’re offered as the easiest possible cloud solution, SaaS solutions have become very popular over the years. Additionally, they are popular because they were the ONLY cloud solution available. But taking the easy option doesn’t offer you the increased control or flexibility needed in today’s changing regulatory, legal, or business environments. Due to the fact that they aren’t true hyperscale clouds, like those of Amazon or Microsoft, SaaS archiving products are extremely restrictive and cannot be customized for real-world situations (otherwise known as “One-size-fits-all). The limitations you’ll encounter include a lack of control over security, narrow eDiscovery options, and costly options to move your archive out if dissatisfied with the SaaS provider. In essence, migrating your Enterprise Vault archives to a SaaS solution only puts you in a marginally better place than you were in with on-premises solutions.
3. Embrace the true power of PaaS
   To truly benefit from a move away from the on-premise Enterprise Vault archive you need access to a next-generation cloud platform that gives you complete control. While SaaS vendors talk a lot about your data benefiting from being in their cloud, the truth is they’re not (and can’t) providing the cloud’s full value. Nor are they giving you much control over the security of your archived data. On the other hand, cloud archiving using native file formats, providing complete control over security protocols and process, on-demand scalability, the ability to designate specific geographic locations for data and access, and automatic updates offering latest and greatest technology developments (with on-premise platforms, you must wait for the vendors update cycle to realize the new technologies. Those are the benefits of true cloud-based PaaS solutions offers.

With that in mind, we can safely say that the first strategy doesn’t make sense for most companies. So, let’s take a look at the two remaining possible strategies open to you: the halfway house versus the flexible, future-proof solution.

In a recent survey of global IT executives, including VPs, Directors, and members of the C-suite at major corporations, only 19% of those surveyed believed 75% or more of their SaaS vendors met all their security requirements. 70% stated they had been forced to make at least one security exception for a SaaS vendor. While many of these organizations are likely using popular SaaS products like Microsoft Office 365 and Salesforce, where the size and standing of the vendor might make the business more amenable to accepting a perceived lower risk, the clear takeaway is that many SaaS solutions don’t provide the security standards and flexibility modern organizations require.

On the topic of encryption keys, an astounding 95% of respondents believed it was important to control their own encryption keys, and 81% were uncomfortable with their SaaS vendors controlling them. However, 74% of those surveyed said they did not control the encryption keys for the majority of their SaaS solutions. This is a worrying statistic and one that many organizations will have to take steps to reverse as regulations continue to tighten and the threat of cybercrime grows. To that end, 92% of executives said they would require more security customization in the future, with 63% of them planning to retire current SaaS applications that don’t provide them control over encryption key creation and management.

These statistics paint a clear picture of the security landscape and the risk that the one-size-fits-all approach of SaaS vendors introduces. As the trend for security customization continues and scrutiny over data access and handling increases, SaaS solutions will become increasingly less palatable for organizations’ risk mitigation efforts. Instead, more secure and customizable solutions will be a major focus.

Stunted Security: SaaS Vendors Don’t Let You Control…

1. Physical data center security
2. Encryption keys
3. Custom compliance reporting
4. Cloud-native directories
5. Firewall and firewall rules
6. Application security analysis
7. Identity management/Access controls
8. Threat detection

Data repositories are growing larger, more complex, and more wide-ranging by the day for every organization. This is coupled with an increasingly stringent regulatory and legal climate, with new, stricter regulatory retention requirements being added every year.

The chances are your organization must either comply with the financial services industry’s very prescriptive SEC 17, FINRA, and MiFID II requirements, have a legal need to ensure ongoing litigation hold requirement of specific custodian data, or want to conduct targeted internal investigations.

The need to capture, immutably store, index/make searchable, audit, and export (with all metadata intact) has radically expanded beyond everyday email. Your compliance journals may need to include content from collaboration platforms like Bloomberg Chat, Slack, Salesforce , social media platforms, Microsoft Teams, and many other sources. [ view all Archive360 connectors ] 

Migrating a legacy Enterprise Vault journal in a legally defensible manner is not easy and should only be done by those with a long history of experience and success. Some migration vendors will tell you that “exploding” or “splitting” journals so that they can be inserted into Office 365 is the best process. Microsoft frowns on this practice and instead suggests that the legacy journals and ongoing journal streams from Office 365 be migrated into another third-party cloud archive. Some companies have chosen to migrate their journals into a SaaS cloud infrastructure but with the issues already highlighted with SaaS clouds, the better choice is to move them into your own, company-controlled cloud tenancy.