If your Enterprise Vault renewal is approaching, simply signing another contract isn’t your only option.
Changes in the Enterprise Vault market, increasing pressure on IT budgets and the growing capabilities of Microsoft 365 are encouraging organisations to reconsider whether maintaining a separate legacy email archive still represents the best long-term strategy.
For many, the question is increasingly simple:
What are the alternatives to Enterprise Vault?
Option 1: Stay with Enterprise Vault
Enterprise Vault remains a mature enterprise archiving platform with extensive capabilities around retention, compliance, search and eDiscovery.
For organisations with complex regulatory requirements, significant on-premises infrastructure or specialist archiving requirements, remaining with Enterprise Vault may still be appropriate.
But a renewal is a good opportunity to calculate the true cost of doing so.
That means looking beyond the licence fee to include:
- Infrastructure and storage
- Backup and disaster recovery
- Specialist support
- Operational administration
- Separate eDiscovery processes
- Future upgrade requirements
If those costs remain justified, renewal may make sense.
If not, there are alternatives.
Option 2: Move to Microsoft 365
For organisations already using Microsoft 365, the obvious question is whether historic email could be brought into the same environment.
Microsoft 365 now provides extensive capabilities around retention, legal hold, information governance and eDiscovery through Microsoft Purview.
Migrating historic email from Enterprise Vault into Microsoft 365 can therefore offer an opportunity to consolidate both data and governance.
Potential benefits include:
- Fewer platforms to manage
- Simplified eDiscovery
- Consistent retention policies
- Reduced infrastructure requirements
- Less dependency on specialist legacy technology
- Reduced vendor lock-in
This doesn’t mean Microsoft 365 is automatically the right destination for every archive.
It does mean it deserves serious consideration before another Enterprise Vault renewal is signed.
Option 3: Move to another cloud archive
Microsoft 365 isn’t the only alternative.
Organisations with particular regulatory, data sovereignty or compliance requirements may prefer a specialist cloud archiving platform.
The important consideration is not simply which vendor offers the longest feature list.
Ask: How easily can we get our data out again?
Today’s replacement platform can become tomorrow’s legacy archive.
Data portability and exit planning should therefore form part of the procurement process from the beginning.
Option 4: Reduce the archive before migrating
A migration project doesn’t necessarily mean moving everything.
Enterprise Vault environments may contain many years of historic email, including information that no longer needs to be retained.
Before migrating, organisations should understand:
- What data they hold
- Why they are retaining it
- Which retention policies apply
- Which users and archives remain relevant
- Whether duplicate or obsolete information can legitimately be removed
A well-planned archive audit can significantly reduce the amount of data that needs to be migrated.
That can reduce migration time, storage requirements and long-term cost.
Don’t wait until the renewal deadline
One of the biggest mistakes organisations make is beginning this conversation too late.
Large Enterprise Vault environments can contain terabytes – sometimes hundreds of terabytes – of historic email.
Understanding, extracting, validating and migrating that information takes time.
Starting the review well before renewal gives you options.
Waiting until the contract is about to expire can leave renewal as the only realistic choice.
Use renewal as a decision point
The Enterprise Vault market is changing, but that doesn’t automatically mean every organisation should migrate.
It does mean organisations should ask whether the archive strategy they adopted ten or fifteen years ago is still appropriate today.
Before your next Enterprise Vault renewal, ask:
What does Enterprise Vault really cost us?
Which capabilities do we still need?
Could Microsoft 365 meet those requirements?
What would migration cost?
What could we decommission afterwards?
And how much flexibility would we gain by moving?
The answer may be to renew.
But it should be a conscious decision rather than the default.
Talk to Ultimate Migrator
If your Enterprise Vault renewal is approaching, Ultimate Migrator can help you understand your existing archive, assess your migration options and determine the most appropriate destination for your historic email data.
You don’t need to decide to migrate before talking to us.
Sometimes the most useful first step is simply understanding your options.