For many organizations, the move to email as a service seems to be a good one. Email is difficult to manage and it consumes increasing amounts of expensive storage. Why not hand over all your email equipment to a reliable service provider?
One reason is the Patriot Act.
This recent blog in ITbusinessedge reveals some chilling news about the Patriot Act. Did you know that the federal government can access anyone’s email without needing a court order? The law itself is a little vague in some parts and Congress is right now working on refinements to its application.
There is no certainty when the Patriot Act will be modified; in the meantime, it is wise for any organization to keep all of its email secure behind the company firewall.
Many thanks to Iron Mountain's Bill Tolsen for raising this issue. For further discussion see his initial comments and comments on further legislation.
... Bob Spurzem. In addition to his role as Ferris analyst, Bob is director of product marketing at Permabit, which offers a grid–based disk storage system.
One Comment
This is obviously a very US-centric viewpoint, and assumes the only place you could keep your mail is in the US. If you keep it in a country where the US government does not have jurisdiction then the Patriot Act ceases to be an issue (unless you are concerned that the government is also decrypting your traffic as it crosses the internet, but in that case they are probably bugging your internal network as well by now).
For some years we have had US customers who have requested that we handle their traffic on infrastructure outside of the US in order to avoid the reach of the Patriot Act.