Once upon a time, there was Postini
Google acquired Postini in 2007, along with their customers. Google had already been leveraging Postini as part of its Gmail for Work offering. Postini provided cloud computing services for filtering e-mail spam and malware, offered optional e-mail archiving, and protected client networks from web-borne malware. Eventually, Postini was discontinued. This left some customers in a difficult position given the 10-year retention period … as a mea culpa, Google offered these organizations essentially unlimited, free Vault Former Employee license.
Vault Former Employee (VFE) licenses are no-cost licenses that allow a Vault administrator to search, hold, export, and retain data in Vault for inactive user accounts. These licenses remove all Google licenses from user accounts and turn off all licensed apps and services except Vault. This was obviously an amazing deal for these particular organizations.
All good things
This 10 year retention period is coming to an end as are the free VFE licenses. In order to keep this data available within Google Vault, an Archived User (AU) license will be required. AU licenses start at $4/user. This is a good time to review the VFE licenses and determine if some user data can be deleted based on the retention policies and procedures of the organization. The free VFE licensing gave organizations a very easy option – keep everything. Going forward, most organizations will likely wish to reduce excess licensing when possible – an Archived User license is $4.
Any other options to replace the VFE license?
Umzuzu does offer a ‘cold storage’ option for those VFE Users that are less likely to be needed for eDiscovery requests. The account data is migrated to exponentially less expensive storage within Google Cloud or AWS. An immutable copy of this User data remains in cold storage as long as needed. If the user data is needed, a copy of the data is pushed into a typical G Suite account, becoming available to the Vault service. Once complete, this data copy is simply deleted – the original is still stored within the cold storage service. The cold storage provides the same capability as an Archived User (AU) license at a tiny fraction of the cost. Management could determine the additional workflow steps are not worth the effort, but for large organizations, these savings can equate to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.
