Archiving Solutions

Enterprise Vault Archiving is the archiving core of the Enterprise Vault Complete suite. It moves content from mailboxes and file servers into a central archive according to defined policies, while access remains seamless for the user through shortcuts. Single instance storage keeps one copy of an attachment instead of dozens, markedly slowing primary storage growth.

All content is indexed, so the archive becomes a searchable corporate knowledge pool rather than a mere storage tier. Retention periods, legal hold and disposition rules are managed from the policy layer, and every action is written to an audit log. The classification, surveillance and eDiscovery modules run on top of this archive — without the archive layer in place, none of them can produce meaningful results.

Enterprise Vault Discovery Accelerator is an eDiscovery solution used to search, preserve, review and export content in the Enterprise Vault archive for legal proceedings, internal investigations and regulatory requests. With case-based workspaces, advanced queries, review tags, sampling and auditable activity logs, it makes it easier to find relevant records within large data sets.

Legal and compliance teams can carry out controlled search and review without depending continuously on the IT department. Eliminating duplicate or irrelevant records through targeted queries reduces outside counsel and data processing costs. Legal hold and the audit trail preserve the integrity of evidence, so the organization can respond to litigation, investigations and information requests faster, more consistently and more defensibly.

Keeping everything forever is a cost; keeping nothing is a risk — and striking that balance by hand becomes impossible as an organisation grows. Enterprise Vault Classification moves the decision into the policy layer. Content entering the archive is evaluated, by metadata and content attributes, against defined governance rules, and a retention category is assigned automatically.

Retention is driven by both time-based and event-based triggers: the end of a contract or an employee's departure can start the retention clock. Expired content is removed through a controlled disposition workflow that leaves an audit record — before a regulator, what matters is not that you deleted something but that you can show the basis and timing of that decision. Classification tags also feed the surveillance and eDiscovery workflows; in an untagged archive, noise filtering is not possible.

When a litigation notice or a regulatory request arrives, what matters is not speed but the integrity of the chain of custody — and gathering data by hand from several systems breaks that chain at the first step. Enterprise Vault eDiscovery Platform runs the process as a single flow. A matter is opened first, with custodians and keywords defined. Structured search runs across the archive over metadata and content, and results can be narrowed by custodian, date range and attribute.

Relevant content is placed under legal hold — from that point deletion or modification is prevented, and metadata integrity and chain of custody are preserved. Collected data can be tagged, redacted and filtered in depth, with OCR supported for image-based documents. Export is produced in native format, with metadata, or in court-ready form, and every step is written to an audit record. It is used alongside Discovery Accelerator: the eDiscovery Platform covers identification, preservation, collection and production, while Discovery Accelerator handles case management and document review.

In regulated industries, having a portion of communications reviewed by a human is an obligation rather than a choice, and running that with spreadsheets produces results that are both inconsistent and indefensible. Enterprise Vault Surveillance gives the process structure. Supervisory policies and reviewer roles are defined first; archived content is then selected by policy or sampling strategy, queued and assigned to reviewers.

Reviewers assess, annotate and categorise the content, and anything found questionable is escalated into an investigation or legal workflow. Every step is recorded, so before an auditor it is not only the outcome but the process itself that can be shown. Alongside email and attachments the module covers Teams, Slack and similar channel content collected through Enterprise Vault Capture; when supervision stops at email, risk stays invisible in exactly the channels growing fastest.

Enterprise communication today is scattered across dozens of systems, and running a separate compliance tool for each channel drives up both cost and the margin for error. Arctera Unified Platform is the cloud counterpart to the on-premises Enterprise Vault design: five jobs operate on one shared data foundation — capture and preserve, classify and enrich, surveil and supervise, discover and investigate, prove and produce. Content is ingested from more than 130 sources, including prompts sent to AI assistants and the responses returned.

Multilingual correspondence and voice content are processed together with translation, and regional requirements are governed from a single policy layer. The vendor offers a single platform subscription rather than modular licensing, so no additional module has to be purchased to open a new compliance workflow. The figures the vendor puts forward are a reduction in false positives of up to 70%, a fall in eDiscovery spend of up to 95%, and search completing within seconds.

Corporate correspondence has long since moved beyond email: it continues in Teams channels, Slack, WhatsApp, voice calls and meeting recordings. Regulators treat these channels the same way they treat email, yet most organisations hold no auditable archive of that content. Enterprise Vault Capture closes the gap: through per-channel connectors — the product's connector layer is known as the Merge1 Connector Suite — it collects content at source and writes it into the Enterprise Vault archive.

What is carried across is not just message text: the conversation thread, participants, attachments and the edit and deletion history travel with it. Without that context a record carries little evidentiary weight, which is why screenshots or bulk exports do not suffice. Ingested content is indexed and becomes the input for classification, surveillance and eDiscovery workflows.