The increase in corporate risk is compounded by mailbox capacity quotas. More than 60 percent of companies still impose mailbox quotas, resulting in loss of productivity as employees must self-manage their email usage, but more importantly put legally actionable data and documents in jeopardy.

Users resort to various approaches to living within quotas, from moving emails or attachments to shared folders; saving emails to Outlook Archive files, then storing those files on their laptop or desktop, away from IT supervision; deleting large emails that may not necessarily be unimportant ones and/or deleting attachments, losing the context in which they were sent. With the rise of litigation and the need to discover data to stay in compliance with corporate, legal and regulatory procedures, this method of meeting mailbox quotas is not only unacceptable, but puts a company at legal risk.

Early-generation email management archiving systems required data to be ingested into an archive so that it could be ”discovered” and placed on legal hold until given permission to delete. The processes were flawed, complex and time-consuming. The locations of the data had to be known. In the case of Outlook Archives, this meant visiting every laptop/desktop to scan for them and move the files to a central location. Email data on shared folders and emails sent internally among employees was often skipped, since it was frequently assumed that only external email was of sufficient threat to the organization to warrant retention.