Imagine that you’re the chief compliance officer of a large company trying to comply with an e-discovery request for employee communications. As your team wades through hundreds of terabytes of emails, chats and collaboration tools, someone spots a problem. Then another. Then another.

First, the archive is missing some critical interactions. Designed for email, it doesn’t capture conversations that played out over Microsoft Teams, Zoom, LinkedIn and other tools. Then the search process slows to crawl, dragging on as the court deadline ticks ever closer. And what little data the team does finally manage to retrieve is corrupted, unreadable, context-free or simply unrelated to the e-discovery request.

This hypothetical scenario is all too real for a growing number of organizations stuck with archiving systems designed in an earlier era of business—and outdated model of data storage.