For a company facing litigation or even strict compliance guidelines, saving and organizing online records can be a challenging task. Today, Google is debuting a new archiving, records management and e-discovery solution for Google Apps for businesses called Vault.
Google Apps Vault, which is priced at $5 per-user, per-month, allows businesses to reduce risks and costs associated with litigation, investigation, and compliance audits by providing an in-depth archiving system in the cloud. So all emails, documents and chat messages from Gmail can be accessed in one place. Businesses can define what needs to be retained for Gmail and on-the-record chat messages based on content, labels, and metadata.
As Google says, governance policies are applied directly to the native data store, eliminating the need to duplicate data in a separate archive and helping to reduce the risks associated with data movement and from spoliation.
Search is also a part of Vault, and via the new service users can search across large amounts of email in an archive, and define and manage collections of message search results and collaborate with others to manage them. Email can also be exported for further review and processing.
Google’s pitch for Vault is that it gives management, IT, legal and compliance users “a systemized, repeatable and defensible platform that will reduce the costs and risks of doing business.” Whenever there is an audit, whether that be legal or just for compliance purposes, Vault, which Google says can be deployed in minutes, will make the e-discovery process simple for large and small businesses.