The Ultimate Guide to Email Archiving Solutions: Compare Top Products

Have you migrated data from our type of email archive before?

What assurances can you give me that everything is migrated successfully? Will the migration be seamless to end users?​

Whether you’re migrating data from an on-premises archive like Enterprise Vault or SourceOne, a SaaS solution like Mimecast, Smarsh, ZL, or Global Relay, you should mitigate migration risks by ensuring the vendor has extensive experience successfully migrating data from your email archive product. When planning an email archive migration, keep in mind the importance of preserving data authenticity should the data ever be subject to an investigation and the migration's impact on end users. It’s crucial to verify that your archived data can be migrated without damaging the chain of custody or impacting your day-to-day operations.

Can you archive other types of data besides email? Is it scalable to meet our needs?

Will your organization need to archive data from other digital communications applications in addition to email? For instance, collaboration data from applications such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, SMS data, audio, and video? What about structured data from legacy applications?​

As you think about data archiving going forward, you should plan for the different types of data your organization will need to retain and how you’ll need to access them. In the future, email may only account for a small percentage of the data your team will need to archive, manage, and make available for search or business intelligence. Ensure the vendor can demonstrate how they can scale cost-effectively in terms of data types and volume to support your ongoing and future workloads.

Can you migrate our journal data?

Are you currently archiving journal data for regulatory compliance? In the future, will you need to journal data?

Depending on why you’re looking to migrate your email archive and your archiving needs in the future, you will need to plan for what to do with your legacy journal, as well as where and how to compliantly archive your journal in the future.

Do you know how much archived data you have? Does that include data for inactive and departed users?

Prior to implementing a new email archiving policy (including archiving directly within Microsoft 365), organizations should review their data and decide where and how they want to manage it going forward. If journal data needs to be archived, you will need to be sure the third-party vendor can do so compliantly, cost-effectively, and in a manner that allows organizations to retain control of your data. That includes meeting data sovereignty requirements, ensuring data authenticity, and not charging additional fees to search or export archived data.

How will my data be stored and processed?

In the future, do you want your archives hosted on-premises, online through a SaaS solution, or in your dedicated cloud tenant?

How you answer these questions can impact the level of control your organization has over its data. Not all cloud-based archives offer the same level of control. Traditional and multi-tenant SaaS solutions often come with restrictions - such as data portability, storage and data processing limits, and infrastructure and application security protocol ownership.

With Archive360’s single-tenant, dedicated SaaS solution, you have complete control over your data – where it is stored, how it is processed, and who can access it. This makes it an ideal email archiving system for companies that prioritize control and security. If you're concerned about how you're going to manage scale, Archive360 is a great solution.

How much control will we have over data security and data sovereignty?

Thinking about your new email archiving solution, will your security policies and processes be set by your security teams or your archiving vendor? And who has the right to create, store, and access your data’s encryption keys? Will you be able to dictate where data is stored, processed and managed to support your data sovereignty obligations?

The best email archiving software integrates with your existing security infrastructure and posture following your existing policies and protocols, allowing you to manage your encryption keys. It will enable you to control where (in which country) and how (immutability) data is stored and processed and who has access to it.

What can I do with the archived data?

Will your legal and e-discovery teams be able to search and review the data in the archive? Will they be able to review the archived data in full context (including GIFs, emojis, etc.)? Will your analytics team be able to mine the data for insights? Will your compliance team be able to extend their retention and other governance policies uniformly and consistently to the archived data? Will the data be secured and ready for AI modeling?

Accessing your emails and files in their original format with comprehensive metadata is crucial if you want highly relevant and scalable search results to analyze and use the latest cloud-based tools to harness AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning). This is also critical for your in-house or external counsel or Records Management teams, depending on your industry and how often historical records need to be accessed. 

Zero-trust security. Zero vendor lock-in.

Designed for the hyperscale cloud, trusted by leading global organizations, and able to unlock value from your archived data, Archive360’s Unified Data Governance Platform is the leading choice for organizations looking for a cloud-native platform to centralize the governance of digital communications data. As part of your email archiving solutions comparison, explore Archive360’s powerful platform features below...

Your data, in your cloud under your control

Archive360 works with some of the most security-conscious and compliance-centric businesses and government agencies in the world. That’s why our unified data governance platform was built to be cloud-agnostic. We’re installed in the customer’s own dedicated cloud tenant, your data is always retained in its original format (not ours), and you decide the infrastructure, security, regulatory, and legal configuration to meet your specific requirements.

Purpose-built for the hyperscale cloud

Archive360’s archiving software was designed from the ground up for use in the cloud, including public clouds like Microsoft Azure. Unlike legacy solutions that were developed to be run on-premises and are now delivered as SaaS solutions, Archive360 unlocks all the benefits of the cloud, from pay-as-you-go pricing to on-demand scalability and immense compute power, Archive360 provides a modern, unified data governance platform built for modern business.

Seamlessly Accelerate Data Migration

Moving your existing data from legacy systems is a key consideration, and comparison is crucial when deciding on a provider to migrate your on-premises archives or Exchange data archiving solutions. To benefit from the many opportunities the cloud offers, you must first find a way to move your on-premises or cloud legacy archives to the hyperscale cloud in a legally defensible manner without the risk of data corruption, inadvertent metadata loss, or change, leaving data behind, negatively impacting ongoing operations and end-user productivity, or damaging chain of custody.

Archive360 has carried out more than 2000 successful migrations across a range of legacy solutions and can compliantly migrate your data to the cloud with full control over workload cost/performance. Thanks to our in-depth knowledge of each legacy solution and many years of experience, we can migrate faster and more accurately than other providers like Transvault and QuadroTech, and maintain full chain of custody without impacting your network bandwidth.

You control your security footprint and encryption keys

Your security teams have spent time and money developing security policies and protocols that meet the unique needs of your business and satisfy those of regulatory agencies. Archive360 ensures you don’t have to make exceptions or compromise on any area of your security footprint. Unlike SaaS providers, who can only provide a “one size fits all” security model, Archive360 enables you to configure our solution to satisfy your security policies and retain complete control over your encryption keys.

Choose where your data is stored

Hyperscale cloud providers offer the widest range of locations to store your data. Whether you need customer information to reside in a specific country to meet data sovereignty and privacy laws such as GDPR or plan to expand your business into new territories, you can choose one or multiple locations to suit your organization’s regulatory needs.

Unlock value by accessing and analyzing your data

User-generated data is quickly becoming the best resource for business insight, yet many are still in the dark. Storing your archived data in its native format in the hyperscale cloud can unlock incredible, actionable insight using modern tools for search and analysis. From AI and ML solutions to the fastest, most accurate search tools, your cloud-based data and email archive can become a new secret weapon for your business.

More than just email data

Your primary concern is email archiving. However, your organization needs to retain other content and records for regulatory or legal reasons. This may include content generated by other e-communication or collaboration platforms, such as Microsoft Teams or Slack. It may also be corporate records generated by back-office systems. It could be data generated by legacy applications that you want to retire. Archive360’s unified data governance platform allows you to retain and manage unstructured content (such as email) as well as structured content (such as application data), eliminating data silos and reducing the costs and risks of retaining, searching, and accessing content.

The archiving features you need

No email archiving solutions comparison would be complete without investigating the basic functionality of the platform. When moving away from a legacy archive, it’s important to know that key features your users rely on in your existing solution will still be available. Fortunately, Archive360’s unified data governance platform not only provides the powerful features we’ve already mentioned but does the basics better too. Here’s a sample of the type of functionality you can expect.

Classification and policy-based data retention, legal hold, and entitlements

Data classification is the process of organizing data into categories or data classes. Achive360’s approach to data classification is to collect and organize only data necessary to your organization’s data management needs – where the data needs to be stored, how long it needs to be retained, who owns it, who can access it, whether it is sensitive information, and so forth. This methodology is more efficient and cost-effective than collecting and organizing a source application’s data by mapping together application data models.

Each data class can have its own governance policies, search characteristics, and metadata schema, as opposed to one rigid schema found in other platforms. Using data classes to provide focus on subsets of data enables you to process, govern and search through petabytes of data with far greater efficiency and precision than platforms designed to manage the entire dataset. By applying data management policies, or rules, to specific data classes, you can control how data objects are ingested, transformed, enriched, stored, entitled, retained, and disposed.

Accelerated eDiscovery

Search across all types of digital communication data, included archived emails, for a unified set of results. Unlike other platforms that use a single index for all its data, which can make searches across large data sets slow, cumbersome, inconsistent, and costly, the Archive360 cloud-native platform provides different levels of search and indexing based on data classes and other search characteristics.
This approach enables the platform to search across petabytes of data, retrieve and present results faster, more cost-effectively, and with far greater precision than other platforms. With case management, culling/filtering, customizable indexing, and legal hold capabilities baked into the platform, you have complete eDiscovery capability. You can even search for keywords and phrases in video and audio files and other modern data formats such as chat and social media.