Digital Ninja works with clients that have high turnover due to the seasonality of work, or because all terms are short terms. These companies can have a costly number of user licenses if they don’t off-board users. The question becomes, “where does all that data go?”
You can leverage Google Vault for retention, but in this scenario you’d have rising user license costs because you can’t delete the user with Google Vault. Keeping the user, even in a suspended state, results in the cost of a user license.
With most seasonal users they don’t have valuable enough data to justify the license cost. But, they still need the data just in case they need to find old communications, do an investigation into an incident, or simply find a contact they were communicating with. It’s also important to note that it is highly unlikely that you’ll ever even look into the archive of most seasonal workers.
Giving these circumstances Digital Ninja suggests “utility accounts”. These accounts can be set up as an archive to dump many off boarded users old emails, contacts, etc… This means we can put more than one account’s history into one utility account. This drastically reduces the number of licenses retained just to keep user data from the seasonal staff.
Taking this a step further and you can create utility accounts by quarter giving you four utility accounts per year. After some time you can simply delete aged out archives to make room for the upcoming year’s archives.
The use of a utility account is a valuable strategy in a Digital Ninja’s weapons chest. Here’s another way we’ve leveraged utility accounts in another Use Case.
