The EU Data Act 2025 has set new regulatory requirements governing how data must be stored, exported, migrated, and protected. The Act eliminates vendor lock-in, mandates fair data portability, and removes egress charges by January 2027, fundamentally changing how organizations manage email archiving and migration.
Why EU Data Act archive migration matters, especially for email archives
Email archives are not just another data store. They sit at the centre of compliance, legal exposure, security operations, and business continuity. When something goes wrong, the archive is often the first place teams turn to.
Common archive use cases include:
Audits and retention verification
Investigations and incident response
E-discovery and legal requests
Establishing timelines, accountability, and evidence
Historically, switching email archiving providers could be extremely difficult, due to:
Proprietary export formats
Limited or unclear exit processes
Slow data retrieval speeds
Hidden switching fees
Data egress costs
Risk of metadata loss
Compliance workflow disruption
These issues often only surfaced during migration — when leverage was lowest.
The EU Data Act (September 2025) significantly changed the data storage and management landscape by removing the problems associated with vendor lock-in. All MSPs and integrators must now support fair data export and switching, enabling you to easily and swiftly retrieve, move, and verify your email archive between different service providers without disruption, friction, or contractual surprises.
It requires providers of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services to:
Enable smooth switching between providers
Remove unjustified data export barriers
Prevent proprietary format restrictions
Eliminate switching and egress charges (by 12 January 2027)
Ensure functional continuity during migration
These changes fundamentally change how archive migrations must be handled, enabling organisations to reconsider email archiving options and consider improved solutions based on value and capability – you can finally shop around.
“The Data Act includes measures to ensure that customers can switch… quickly and smoothly, and without losing any data or the functionality of applications… The Data Act will also entirely remove switching charges, including charges for data egress (i.e. charges for data transit), from 12 January 2027.”
What should an EU Data Act-compliant email archive migration plan include?
Simply extracting data is not enough – you also need to be sure that your email archive can be migrated securely and made available in its new location with integrity and compliance intact.
A compliant migration must preserve:
Data integrity
Legal defensibility
Audit continuity
Metadata completeness
Search functionality
Legal and compliance workflows cannot pause during email archive migrations, and an inability to demonstrate total continuity could lead to failures in audits or legal scrutiny in the future.
Import performance is critical to email archive migration
Export capability alone does not guarantee compliance. Slow import processes can increase your costs, exposure to legal risk, operational complexity and audit vulnerability. Make sure your new provider can support high-performance ingestion to ensure predictable migration timelines, reduce operational overlap, and lower overall risk.
Your email archive migration checklist
An email archive migration is not just a technical task — it is a strategic transition that affects compliance, operational continuity, risk exposure, and cost control. Before starting the process, it’s essential to ensure that contractual terms, data scope, security safeguards, and operational protections are clearly defined and verifiable.
The secure, automated email archive for cost-effective compliance and e-discovery.
Libraesva Email Archiver is built around the principles of the EU Data Act, providing you with open format storage without proprietary export dependencies.
It supports flexible storage and accelerated bulk data migration for both legacy and live mail sources, giving you predictable throughput and clear progress visibility. This will enable you to establish realistic timelines, reduce parallel operations, and lower overall operational risk during migration – as well as provable integrity and a compliance posture that remains future-proof.
Open-format ZIP archive storage
Evidence-grade integrity controls, including encryption, anti-tamper protection, auditing, and trusted timestamps
Fast search and e-discovery workflows that scale without operational friction
Practical migration paths including batch import of PST, OST, and compressed legacy archives
Flexible deployment options across cloud, on prem, and virtualised environments
The EU Data Act (September 2025) is legislation designed to eliminate vendor lock-in and ensure fair data portability across cloud and digital service providers.
How does the EU Data Act affect email archiving?+
The EU Data Act requires that email data is stored, archived, and in a way that supports portability, interoperability, and compliant migration between service providers.
Does the EU Data Act remove email archive switching costs?+
Yes. The regulation removes switching and egress charges entirely by 12 January 2027.
Does the EU Data Act guarantee compliance during migration?+
The Act requires portability and fairness, but organisations remain responsible for maintaining integrity, auditability, and compliance during migration.
Can email archives be migrated without service disruption?+
Yes, if the archive supports parallel operations, metadata preservation, and uninterrupted search and legal hold functionality.
What is the biggest compliance risk during archive migration?+
Loss of metadata, broken audit trails, and the inability to prove integrity continuity.
Combining end‑to‑end email encryption with a searchable, compliant archive ensures both confidentiality and recoverability — giving you the best of security and visibility.
Libraesva enables GDPR compliance by giving you full control over email retention and secure erasure—from granular AES‑256 encryption to immutable audit logs and easy ‘right to be forgotten’ data purges.
