The challenge of “what do we do with everything we already have?” is one of the most common questions during a major legacy archive migration to a new platform, or to the cloud.
When an independent government agency decides to move to Office 365, the path forward looks straightforward on paper. Retire the old system, cut costs, and embrace the cloud. But for a government agency with strict data retention obligations, the required legacy email and journal archives need someplace to go. This data carries legal weight long after the platform that created it is decommissioned.
This is the story of how Cloudlocker and our Partner helped a client navigate that challenge.
Client Profile
Industry: Government
Size: 5,000 + employees
Revenue: $2+ billion annual budget
Headquarters: Washington DC
An independent government agency related to financial compliance and protection.
The Setup: Legacy Archive Migration
The client had been managing its archive data using Arctera Enterprise Vault (EV) and Discovery Accelerator, with managed services and support from our Partner. The system worked. Until the client opted to retire its EV services after a move to Microsoft Office 365.
The problem: Years of legacy email and journal data couldn’t simply be left behind. Government and industry regulations and retention requirements meant that data needed to remain accessible, searchable, and auditable. Office 365 was not an ideal spot to migrate this data, due to the additional licensing costs. Also, searching the vast amount of legacy email in shared mailboxes is somewhat cumbersome in Purview. Expanding the journal data to individual mailboxes would have ballooned the data volume 5x.
The Partner account team, including a dedicated consultant and account manager, recognized the gap early. Rather than waiting for the client to raise the issue, they proactively identified Cloudlocker as a purpose-built solution for exactly this kind of legacy archive scenario.
Why Cloudlocker?
For an agency operating under federal compliance frameworks, the bar for any new platform is high. Our partner proposed Cloudlocker as a long-term home for our client’s legacy email and journal archive. Several features made it a natural fit:
- Flexible deployment: The ability to deploy within the client’s own Azure tenant – critical for ensuring compliance with strict security requirements.
- Custom retention policies: Configurable to match the client’s specific regulatory timeline
- eDiscovery capabilities: Full search and legal hold functionality for ongoing compliance needs
- Security posture: ISO-certified, U.S.-based team, with enterprise-grade infrastructure
- Reduced Hardware requirements: Enabling them to do more with far less overhead
The Need for Deploying on Their Own Tenant
One of the more nuanced decisions in this engagement was how Cloudlocker would be deployed. Because the client is a federal entity, any solution outside of the internal environment would require FedRAMP certification. Using a shared commercial tenant wasn’t the right path. Getting a vendor’s shared environment certified is a time-consuming and costly process. Because of Cloudlocker’s flexible deployment options, this is unnecessary.
Deploying Cloudlocker within our client’s own Azure tenant offered a faster, more practical route to compliance and came with several additional advantages:
Resource Isolation
Rather than sharing computing infrastructure with other Cloudlocker customers, the client operates its own dedicated instance. There’s no resource contention, no shared risk surface.
Enhanced security control
When elevated security certifications are required, owning the tenant means the agency controls the compliance posture end-to-end. There’s no dependency on a third party’s certification status.
Greater operational flexibility
With Cloudlocker running inside their own Azure environment, the client retains more direct control over configuration, management, and access policies.
The Results: A Successful Deployment
The Cloudlocker team successfully deployed Cloudlocker within the client’s tenant. The process allowed the client to:
- Eliminate the need to maintain a static legacy email archive
- Reduce compliance risk and adhere to the Managing Government Records directives
- Preserve defensible access to journal data and keep it easy to search
- Accelerate the migration timeline
- Avoid costly increases for Microsoft licensing
A Note on Multi-Tenancy
Cloudlocker itself is a multi-tenant platform. In its commercial deployment, multiple customers run separate, isolated instances within a shared environment. That model works well for most organizations.
However, for clients with specialized compliance requirements such as federal agencies, financial institutions, and healthcare organizations, deploying on their own tenant deployment provides an additional layer of separation and sovereignty that shared infrastructure can’t replicate.
The Takeaway: Continued Partnership
The partnership between the Partner, the client, and Cloudlocker illustrates the importance of having a plan for the data you’re leaving behind during a legacy archive migration, and not just the data you need to move with you.
Our partner’s value here wasn’t just technical implementation. It was the account team’s foresight in identifying a compliance gap before it became a compliance problem, and offering the right tool (in this case, Cloudlocker) to fill it.
For organizations facing similar transitions, the questions worth asking early are: What are our retention obligations for legacy data? Does our migration plan account for those archives? And does our solution meet the specific regulatory framework our industry operates under?
About Cloudlocker
Cloudlocker is a simple and affordable solution for managing legacy email, journal, and file archives. Cloudlocker provides solutions for securely and compliantly managing archive data.