The global pandemic has driven Microsoft’s 365 adoption to more than 258 million users while almost doubling Teams users to 75 million in just six months of forced remote work. However, this pivot to the cloud is not a new trend with over 70% of Fortune 500 companies purchasing Office 365 in the last year. Has this rapid migration left your corporate legal and compliance teams struggling to keep up in a one size fits all Microsoft world? Microsoft 365 does a good job of checking the boxes on generic eDiscovery and Info Governance functionality from the IT purchasing perspective, but those legal and compliance features may not meet your company’s unique discovery, regulatory or organizational requirements. Your IT team no longer has access to the architecture behind the user interface and cannot easily create customize connectors and workflows you have depended on. While the basic MS Core eDiscovery, threat protection, information protection, and compliance features available at the enterprise (Microsoft 365 E3) level may suffice for small and medium businesses, most large enterprise customers quickly find a large list of feature gaps and non-Microsoft data sources.
MS Core eDiscovery Gaps
MS Core eDiscovery is built for SMB customers with few siloed matters covering a limited number of custodians and Microsoft 365 data sources. There are no reports or tools across your matters. Your legal team must have the exact URLs of custodian OneDrives, SharePoint sites, Teams sites and other custodial data sources. Adding each new custodial data source to holds or searches can take 6-8 steps where you paste individual URLs into a field. Microsoft’s own 1,000+ legal support staff found this too cumbersome and use a custom workflow with spreadsheets and PowerShell scripts instead. 
Governing the Enterprise, Not Just Microsoft 365
Your enterprise is far more than Microsoft 365 mailboxes and SharePoint sites. Microsoft 365’s architecture is optimized for user experience instead of large enterprise governance, compliance, and eDiscovery capabilities. Why else would Microsoft’s Advanced eDiscovery re-process and deep index custodial data instead of using the existing index? You cannot search what you do not see, access, or has already been deleted by a bad actor. Microsoft 365 no longer supports email journaling or a central preservation archive. By trying to be everything to everyone, Microsoft 365 by itself cannot meet every one of your requirements.
Veritas and Microsoft 365 – Better Together
Veritas Digital Compliance solutions fill the Microsoft 365 gaps for true Information Governance while minimizing user impact. Veritas provides transparent access to 80+ data sources for true centralized, standardized smart content management.
- Comprehensive, immutable journal capture of all content sources
- Full audit trails and chain of custody
- Full discovery quality search of 400+ data types and automatic OCR of images
- Audio search of meeting recordings and voicemail
- Automated classification with 950+ preconfigured patterns and 150 policies
- Defensible record preservation and expiry
- Smart migration of legacy shares and PSTs
- Automated compliance monitoring to minimize risk
- Advanced analytics and machine learning to visualize data to automate and scale actions.
