Google Vault: Pretty good but not the best vault for your company secrets
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Google Vault in our organization primarily for archiving and storing important email communications, relevant chats, and other related information wrt to at-risk projects.
The business problem the Google Vault solves is -
1. Provides an easy way to archive emails and chats etc.
2. Helps in eDiscovery of said emails and chats with much ease.
Scope is -
1. Org level - eDiscovery of important at-risk emails, convos, chats, attachments, etc that might be required for reuse or any legal purposes.
2. User level - Works as a backup option for users for their important attachments, chats, etc.
Pros
- Archiving - Archiving of emails, chats, etc, Pretty easy to use and have some amazing features wrt to duration, access, etc.
- Search - Post archival, Google Vault makes it pretty easy to search for relevant content and eDiscovery.
- Auditing - Workspace manager can easily audit user activities. Helps security at the org level.
Cons
- Export - Area of improvement for export features. Limited options that could be improved.
- Storage - While the storage is easy, it needs to improve on the amount that can be stored. Very less and quite expensive at an org level.
- Customer support - Not a very good customer or post-sales support making the learning curve very steep.
Most Important Features
- Archival
- Search
- Auditing
Return on Investment
- Positive - Archial and eDiscovery solutions have greatly enhanced our ROI for google workspace apps. Really helpful and saves a lot of time and money to quickly and securely store data.
- Positive - ALl cloud storage helps with less data retention storage and 24*7 availability helps with quick TATs and in turn +ve ROI.
- Negative - Export features are limited and for that reason, many times have to use 3rd party apps for conversion.
Alternatives Considered
Veritas Enterprise Vault
Other Software Used
Veritas Enterprise Vault, Microsoft Exchange Online Archiving




