Hotel California: The Email Security Trap You Checked Into and Can't Leave
Hotel California: The Email Security Trap You Checked Into and Can't Leave
Email security platforms are today's Hotel California. Organisations sign on for best-in-class threat protection, compliance coverage, and the promise of a unified archive — and the platform delivers. For a while.
Then, quietly, years of email data accumulate inside the vendor's infrastructure: millions of messages, compliance records, and audit trails the business is legally obligated to retain. Nobody thinks about leaving because, functionally, leaving has become unthinkable. The door was only ever designed to open one way.
That asymmetry is not accidental — it is a business model. When renewal time comes, IT leaders believe they are negotiating. They are not. The vendor knows exactly what migration would cost, and a thirty percent price increase above market rates stops being a negotiation point and starts being a hostage situation with a polite subject line. That is not a renewal. That is leverage.