Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 are excellent products. For most companies, they’re the obvious answer. But “most companies” aren’t regulated Indian banks, NBFCs, or insurers — and for those, the email decision turns on a different set of questions than the feature list.
Before you renew or sign, here are five questions worth answering honestly.
1. Where does the data — and the logs and backups — actually live?
RBI’s data-localisation direction expects customer and payment data to stay in India. “Available in an India region” and “guaranteed to reside only in India, with logs and backups too” are not the same sentence. Get the second one in writing.
2. Whose jurisdiction governs your customers’ data?
A foreign provider operates under foreign law and foreign lawful-access regimes, regardless of where a data centre sits. For a regulated entity, jurisdiction is a board-level question, not an IT footnote.
3. Can you run it on your own infrastructure — even air-gapped — if you have to?
Some workloads (and some regulators) require on-premise or air-gapped deployment. If your platform only exists as someone else’s cloud, that option is off the table forever.
4. Who owns the encryption and the certificate authority?
S/MIME signing and encryption are only as sovereign as the PKI behind them. An in-house Certificate Authority — where you control the trust chain — is a materially different posture from certificates issued and held by a third party abroad.
5. What does exit look like?
Data-in-India, INR billing with a GST invoice, and no foreign code dependency aren’t just compliance niceties — they’re what a clean, low-lock-in exit is made of.
Where XgenPlus fits
XgenPlus is built for exactly this set of answers: data residency and jurisdiction in India; cloud, private cloud, or on-premise/air-gapped deployment; an in-house PKI/Certificate Authority for S/MIME; IDN/EAI multilingual addresses (email in Indian scripts and .भारत domains); and INR pricing with local billing and support — 25+ years in email, 50M+ mailboxes, used across Indian government, PSU and BFSI.
It’s not about whether the foreign suite is good. It’s about whether it can answer those five questions the way a regulator wants to hear them.
→ See the per-provider comparisons
→ Map your controls with our BFSI checklist
