How to Choose an Enterprise Vault Migration Tool

In this blog, we’ll review several key points and considerations when choosing an Enterprise Vault migration tool. Migrating to Office 365 doesn’t need to be a daunting, costly experience. With the simple guidance in this article, you’ll be well prepared to choose the best Enterprise Vault migration tool to fulfil all your project requirements.

What is Enterprise Vault Used for?

Many organizations implemented a system like Enterprise Vault many years ago. Essentially it promised two things:

• Reduce the size of end-user mailboxes

The promise of larger mailboxes could be delivered to the end-user community often without the addition of expensive fast storage used by an Exchange Server. Items in end-user mailboxes were replaced by shortcuts (sometimes referred to as stubs), with the full item being stored in Enterprise Vault storage. These items were typically aged items and were not accessed frequently, so the Enterprise Vault storage, while sizable, could be slower and less expensive.

• Capture all Microsoft Exchange journal emails

For many global organizations capturing an immutable copy of every message sent or received on the Microsoft Exchange platform is critical. Used regularly in eDiscovery situations having that undeniable version of the message could help an organization massively in a legal case.

Your organization may have implemented Enterprise Vault for a specific purpose some time ago, but the system may have grown to encompass more than initially planned.  For example, there are many other aspects to Enterprise Vault such as SharePoint archiving, File System Archiving, Public Folder archiving, Domino archiving, eDiscovery capabilities, and more.

Large enterprise-sized organizations have also typically deployed Enterprise Vault globally. Perhaps the deployment started with 1-2 servers in a single data center, then rapidly expanded to cover a global user population.

Some organizations may have also inherited other Enterprise Vault environments. These more than likely have come from a merger or acquisition performed over the years. The tricky part with these, apart from them being separate entities, is that they could also be on different versions of the archiving system software.

How do I move Enterprise Vault to Another Server?

One of the things that some organizations do after having Enterprise Vault for some time is to move the data (the archives) between Enterprise Vault servers. There are many reasons for doing this that are outside this article's scope.

The thing to note is that the task of moving Enterprise Vault data between servers is not a quick and simple one. Newer versions of Enterprise Vault have a ‘Move Archive’ feature, which, with some limitations, can help if you want to move data from one Enterprise Vault server to another Enterprise Vault server.

There are also third-party applications that can do this. Some of those allow you to migrate between Enterprise Vault servers that belong to different organizations and can significantly help any efforts you may need to make in terms of consolidation.

How does Enterprise Vault Assist with Migration Projects?

The actual migration project that your organization will likely want to make is to migrate Enterprise Vault data to the cloud. More specifically, moving Enterprise Vault legacy archive data to Microsoft Office 365.

The question is:

How does Enterprise Vault assist with migration projects like this?

The answer is that there are several critical things that Enterprise Vault does to help you and third-party organizations achieve these types of migration in a relatively short timescale.

API

A rich application programming interface (API) is a key differentiator of Enterprise Vault compared with some of its competitors. To some, it might seem the wrong path to follow: why would a software company want to make it easy for developers and third-party companies to access, manage, ingest and extract data from the platform? The key is extensibility. A robust API, like Enterprise Vault has, makes it easy for developers to extend the platform to perform additional tasks and, of course, to be able to ingest and extract data easily.

In fact, the Enterprise Vault API is the only supported way to get data into and out of the platform.

Access to indexing information

Enterprise Vault has, since the beginning, had a very robust indexing engine. While it has changed over the years and been replaced with better versions when needed, it’s always remained a great source of information for third-party developers to use.

Constant access to original data

Even with features in Enterprise Vault that move data off to cold storage, it is always possible to access the original data. This is crucial when it comes to performing a compliance migration. You will be able to prove you’ve got the unmodified version of the item exactly as it was many years ago when it was an email in a mailbox. This is independent of Microsoft Exchange version or Microsoft Outlook version.

There are more ways than these listed above; in fact, many of the third-party migration vendors are more than happy to share their unique ways that the Enterprise Vault product helps them to achieve their migration results.

7 Things to Help Choose An Enterprise Vault Migration Tool

Choosing an Enterprise Vault migration tool doesn’t have to be time-consuming or difficult. Review these key points to help you choose and make your migration project a success.

Proof of concept

Before you invest a considerable amount of time, resources and money on a migration project, it’s critical that you do a proof of concept with your chosen tool. At Cloudficient, we always recommend doing a proof of concept. We perform these in your environment, with your users, and your data – not just some demo/test environment with limited, controlled data.

If your chosen migration tool and vendor of choice doesn’t allow you to do a proof of concept or insists on an up-front commitment to purchase, it’s worth considering a different product and vendor!

Speed

A question that is usually on many people’s minds when it comes to performing a digital transformation project is:

How long will it take?

Put this another way; it’s all down to speed. How fast will this migration go when it’s working with production data and production capacity?

Using the latest technologies and taking a cloud native approach means that at Cloudficient we regularly surpass even our own expectations regarding migration speed.

Remember, though... it’s not all about speed...

Inclusion of automated steps to perform all associated tasks

Migrating the data from the source Enterprise Vault environment (or environments) is only one part of a digital transformation project. Think of all those extra things that you might want to do:

• Stop archiving the mailbox on the source Enterprise Vault environment
• Provision a personal archive mailbox in Office 365
• Set the personal archive to unlimited size
• Set message size limits
• Assign an Office 365 license
• Disable Virtual Vault
• Hide the Enterprise Vault buttons in Outlook
• Delete shortcuts from the primary mailbox
• Communicate progress to end-users
• Create custom folders in a mailbox and assign retention policy tags

… and so on.

Not only do you want to do all these extra tasks to have a successful migration to Office 365, but you also want to automate them too. We do this with our ReMAD platform, which provides a command center to manage your entire migration and automate all those extra tasks.

We’ve created a video that explains the ReMAD platform, here.

Seasoned professionals running the migration

It’s one thing to have a fantastic software product to perform the migration steps required for a project, but it’s another thing when it comes to using them and finding solutions to unexpected problems.

At Cloudficient, we have over a century of team experience working with migration projects for the largest enterprise customers across the globe.

What does this mean for your project?

It means that with our experience and know-how, we can tackle any problem that we encounter with professionalism making sure customers are the front and center of everything that we do.

Flexible ways to pay

At Cloudficient, we believe in being different. That’s why we introduced a new, flexible way to pay. Rather than paying upfront for all the migration costs, often hitting obstacles when it comes to budget constraints (Capex), we also support the approach of using an operational expenditure (Opex) model to address a pending migration on a pay-as-you-go methodology.

We’ve written more about this in this blog post.

Ease of deployment

As was mentioned earlier in this blog, we have a cloud native solution based on Kubernetes.

What does this mean for your project?

It means that we can deploy minimal on-premise components and be migrating using our cloud infrastructure in a fraction of the time versus others. It also means that there is almost no limit to how fast or how much data can be pushed through the system. Our platform seamlessly handles scaling up and scaling back as the needs of the migration change, at no extra cost to you.

Comprehensive auditing and reporting

As you can imagine, when you migrate thousands of user archives in parallel, there are many steps that must take place (see the section earlier in this blog where we list just a few of them), as well as the extraction and ingestion of data. All these steps are tracked by our platform. The command center approach taken in the platform means you can see at a glance what’s happening in the project and immediately address any issues or errors. On top of this, with the auditing processes built-in, you can see exactly what happened to each user archive and when.

In this blog, you’ve discovered seven key points to help you choose an Enterprise Vault migration tool. If you’re ready to make the leap from Enterprise Vault to Office 365, contact us today!

With unmatched next generation migration technology, Cloudficient is revolutionizing the way businesses retire legacy systems and transform their organization into the cloud. Our business constantly remains focused on client needs and creating product offerings that match them. We provide affordable services that are scalable, fast and seamless.

If you would like to learn more about how to bring Cloudficiency to your migration project, visit our website, or contact us.