Case Study: Department of Health and Social Care achieves searchable, compliant preservation of 34M+ emails with Preservica

Department of Health and Social Care - Customer Case Study

The Department of Health & Social Care faced a large-scale content decommissioning challenge: millions of email records (1998–2013) and attachments were spread across multiple legacy Lotus Notes databases, making search and context retrieval difficult. These records needed to be retained (until at least 2033 or indefinitely) to meet Freedom of Information requests, Parliamentary questions and public inquiry demands, while preserving metadata and keeping emails and attachments together for context.

The team ran a proof of concept with Preservica, AD7 and Atos and completed a migration (2018–2020) to a single OAIS-aligned cloud platform. The result was fully indexed, preservable storage (transforming 34 million emails into some 58 million digital files and consolidating TBs of data), continued compliance with public‑information mandates, major cost and risk savings, instant searchable access and trusted preservation with metadata ingest, fixity checks and audit trails.

Department of Health and Social Care