The City of Boston’s Mayor’s office is embroiled in controversy for not preserving email records for a key adviser to the Mayor. The specific details are still being uncovered, and storage forensic experts have been retained to  try to recover deleted messages from workstations and servers. If the backup tapes exist some of the data will be recovered, but at huge expense.

As we wait for the investigation to report the facts, what we do know is that the tax payer will bear the expense burden for forensic experts, and the City of Boston’s existing $1 million dollar outlay for archiving and e-discovery last year did not adequately preserve all the data.

On-premise expensive software and hardware based archives are less secure and more susceptible to tampering than cloud-based archives. The right cloud-based solution can be more secure than on-premise, reducing data touch points, one set of secure access credentials, and always allowing fast immediate access to all the stored data.