Why Email Archiving Solutions Exist and How To Migrate Off of Them

[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome. This is Quest Unscripted. A Vlog series on trending topics. And Quest solutions related to Active Directory. Office 365. Oh, and don't forget, Azure AD. You are here because you have questions. We're here because we have answers. I think. We will address questions we've received from customers. Who experience the same challenges as you. All with the goal of helping you confidently move-- Manage-- --and secure your Microsoft environment. We call the show Quest Unscripted because-- Except for this intro-- --nothing we say is scripted or rehearsed. And we're pretty sure you'll notice that right away. Why do archiving solutions exist? What's the deal? Archiving solutions have been around for a long, long time. It started with Exchange on-prem, and really that's the only place that lived when Exchange was on-prem. There's two main benefits on what an archiving solution brings to the table, which is why companies were really interested in doing it. The first one is what we would call mailbox management size. The size of the Exchange databases, while those Exchange databases resided on on-prem storage-- exchange servers-- they would get large. Administrators were forced to set up quotas, maybe, on individual mailboxes. That usually didn't go over very well. So what's the solution that you can handle at an administrative level? Which is archiving. Normally, it would be an age-based strategy. Let's say, anything older than six months, they'd archive it. The original item gets archived and is replaced with a tiny little stub, substantially smaller. So the mailbox decreases dramatically. The EDB, the exchange database, reduces dramatically. The backups are now faster. The recovery, if that is the case, is faster. On the end user's experience, the cache is smaller, the OST and whatnot. So a lot of benefits with that. And that solved a lot of problems. So administrators didn't have to go out and buy more storage. Which is expensive. The other benefit, which is huge, is for eDiscovery compliance concerns. And that usually revolves around journaling. Which is an Exchange function. That's where a copy of an email sent and received within the org is sent to another mailbox. Let's just call it a journal mailbox. And that's everything. So regardless of whether an end user deletes their copy, or the original item, the copy is safe for whatever you need it for-- eDiscovery, compliance, whatever. That's an Exchange function. Typically, most companies can't do that. Because, as you can imagine, that journal mailbox will get massive within days and it'll blow up your Exchange server. And problems are not solved that way. It causes problems. So archiving that journal mailbox instantly, rather than that age-based strategy I was talking about earlier, allows for all those needs to be satisfied. I can now search everything regardless of what the end user does to their version. So those two benefits is what archiving brings to the table. That really only exists in an Exchange on-prem environment. Go ahead. Which brings up my next question. So that's why they existed for a long time. And now we're in the Microsoft 365 era, where most customers probably are no longer using Exchange on-premises. So what are customers doing? What are environments doing? What are organizations are doing to get that information over to the cloud? OK. Well, let me address the first part-- why archiving is no longer relevant anymore in that scenario. So Microsoft-- like I said before, journaling is an Exchange function. In the 365 world, Microsoft doesn't really want you to journal because it's their storage and it's their journal mailbox. And they don't want you to hoard all that data. Even though it's important, they don't want you to do it. But they've changed the technology to where you don't need to make a copy. You already have the original item. Why don't we just preserve that-- no copy needed? And so if an end user deletes their copy, it's still there. The end user doesn't know it, but it's still there. So journaling, you've satisfied that. So you don't need to journal anymore. So eDiscovery needs are satisfied in 365 without sending it out to a third party archive. The same thing with mailbox management. Rather than, when it was on-prem, you have 100 gig-- or not even 1 gig-- usually, it's very small-- with Exchange Online, they gave you 100 gig right off the bat. And then they'll give you an archive mailbox, depending on your tier, which will go up to 1.5 terabytes. So there is no reason whatsoever to have a third party archive. So your question resides around-- so what do customers do that do have a third party archiving solution, where they're in, obviously, Microsoft 365? There are solutions out there. And Quest, actually, is the leader in the industry when it comes to solving that problem. We can take those archives, migrate them to where they're supposed to be in the new paradigm-- in their primary mailbox-- typically, it would go to the archive mailbox-- and now they can deprecate their archiving solution altogether. They can stop paying maintenance on it. They can reuse that storage or get rid of it if they're trying to reduce their footprint in their data center. And we are the industry leader in migrating that workload up so you can get rid of the archiving server. So you sit with customers all the time. What are the typical questions that you want your customers to ask that they are not asking? Or what are the common questions that they're asking that you're like, I'm glad you're asking me this question-- and this is where you go in and talk about how Quest can help? Well, initially, a lot of customers think that they still have to have that archiving solution. They think that they have to somehow set up a journal connector in their Exchange online to send it back down to their archiving server. Which is a capability and you can do that. It's just you don't need to. So the question would be, is eDiscovery important to you? Mailbox management isn't really that much of a concern anymore. But is eDiscovery important to you? Yes. Well, then, did you know that Microsoft does this? Because I know you have an archiving solution now. Or maybe they didn't tell me that information in advance. Simply ask them-- do you have an archiving solution now? And what are your plans with that? Did you want to be able to send everything up? Just like you migrated your mailbox, would you also like to be able to send those archives up? Yes. Then let's have a discussion about that because we can definitely help you there. So let's talk about our archiving solution, the Quest archiving solution. How can we help? What are some of the benefits-- key benefits-- for the solution? To get into the weeds, the archiving solution-- we support the major archiving solutions out there-- Enterprise Vault, EMC SourceOne, the Quest Archive Manager, the Metalogix Archive Manager, EAS-- those are the primary ones, the big boys on the block. The smaller ones, we don't really deal with because they are just so small-- a niche market. But we can connect directly with those, talk to the APIs on those servers directly-- we have relationships with those vendors-- talk directly to the APIs, extract the data out of those archives in batches so we don't mess with the pipe up and throttling on the Microsoft side. We can alleviate most of those concerns. Dump the archives out, and those batches, into a cache location. And then convert that data into a blob and send it up to the proper target. So we do automatic mapping. Even orphaned archives-- people that have archives that no longer reside in the company-- we can still handle those, too. We'll just map it to the appropriate user's target. We'll automatically create a mailbox for that without having to consume a license at all on the Microsoft side. Migrate the data. And that archive is now done. And we just keep rolling until all the archives have been migrated. And at that point, you're free to unplug that server any time you want. Yeah. And how long have we been doing this? And here's a question, too, because I know you're extremely busy just focused on those kind of solutions. If I was to license the Quest Software solution, what do you typically see as the roadblocks for the solution? Or where customers aren't 100% ready-- or things we go through and we're like, it's a learning curve every time we go through it-- what are some of the hiccups out there? The main one-- and I just had a call this morning about this-- is a large company that has a large compliance eDiscovery need-- and they are using eDiscovery case management software built into Enterprise Vault in this particular example-- and the legal team is already very used to that solution. And so it's a paradigm shift for them to have to use the Microsoft one. But, honestly, that's where it's at. That's where everybody's going. That's the new paradigm. They just have to eventually move. Because, eventually, these third party archiving solutions are going to be done. And they will have to make the move sooner or later. So it just makes sense to have the discussion now and think about it. Yeah. Well, awesome. Well, I see, in your background, you have your email address. And I guess you're advertising, if anyone has a question around our archiving solution, to reach out to you. But definitely reach out to your account manager as well. But, hey, Rich, I appreciate the time. And you can go back to the nice Florida weather. Thanks. You, as well, Ohio. But OK.