The Importance of Migrating Legacy K-12 Email Archives

Many school districts are moving their onsite legacy email archives to a third-party cloud provider at a fraction of the cost it takes to manage and store what they’re required to keep based on a retention schedule.

Switching to a cloud-based vendor also reduces security risks. Every year, new threats appear. These and other vulnerabilities are one of the primary focuses of a third-party provider, which is contractually obligated to protect your data from being lost or accessed by a hacker.

Another reason to migrate legacy email archives centers around litigation. A lot of old archiving platforms hold your data, but don’t provide a great way for you to find specified sets of data, at least not in a time-sensitive manner. When looking at upgrading to any cloud-based solution, best-in-class search functionality will allow you to find what you need in a short amount of time.

By keeping your legacy email archives onsite and on hardware that regularly needs updated, you’re also keeping the maintenance and execution of any eDiscovery requests solely in the hands of your IT department. When school districts switch to Gaggle for Archiving & Backup, I’ve seen a lot of technology teams offload this responsibility to a non-IT department, whether that’s legal, communications or an office admin.

Companies like Gaggle build modern archiving solutions with the end user in mind. Of course, there’s always going to be nuances that are more technical and require IT’s help, but you want there to be a support system for any user who would benefit from pulling data from an archive.

Lastly, when deciding to migrate your legacy K-12 email archive, make sure the transfer of data is secure. Encryption should take place during the transfer and once data gets to its destination, known as encryption at rest. Also, be sure to get as much original metadata as possible. A big reason you have an archive in the first pace is to maintain the original data, and when you have to produce that content for eDiscovery or any reason, you’ll want it to be in its original form.