How to Migrate Enterprise Vault to Microsoft 365

Many organizations realize that the cost of maintaining a legacy archiving system like Enterprise Vault is increasing year after year, while cloud archiving is providing more compliance features and security options. This is also a pain point if your user population has already migrated from Exchange on-premise to Exchange Online within Microsoft 365 (M365). 

Key Takeaways

• Many organizations are facing increasing costs for maintaining a legacy archive like Enterprise Vault. This can be a pain point if users have already migrated from Exchange on-premise to Exchange Online (Microsoft 365). 
  • Enterprise Vault users have begun to face new licensing requirements that state all users that can be searched against now require a license. Even those who have already left the organization.
• There are different layers of costs to consider when maintaining an on-premise environment for Enterprise Vault: IT staff time, Enterprise Vault license maintenance costs, SQL Server and licensing, Enterprise Vault server cost and maintenance, archive and index storage, and legal staff time. 
• Migrating Enterprise Vault to M365 can help curb some of these increasing costs and make life easier for users and legal teams. 
• There are two approaches to migrating legacy Enterprise Vault archived data to Microsoft 365: manual/tools or using a full-featured Enterprise Vault migration tool. 

In a previous blog, we discussed that these costs consist of many layers. Here’s a recap of them:

• IT Staff time to manage / update / patch / troubleshoot.
• Enterprise Vault License Maintenance costs -If you are not paying maintenance, you are risking your data and the ability to respond to legal inquiries. Veritas has been known to audit their customers and require that they pay licensing fees for all users that can be searched against, even if they are no longer with an organization.
• Enterprise Vault SQL Server and licensing.
  
• Enterprise Vault Servers require a considerable amount of space and energy.
• Archive and Index Storage.
• Legal Staff time to search, cull and produce data for eDiscovery in two data repositories (instead of one).

None of these costs seem simple to solve while maintaining the an Enterprise Vault environment. 

Addressing each of those concerns begs the question, “Why should I even migrate Enterprise Vault data into Microsoft 365?” Not only do you want to curb some of the increases (year on year) in costs, but you also want to give legal teams a single pane of glass under which to perform eDiscovery, hastening the search process and producing more conclusive results. Cloudficient designed Expireon from its inception to help clients save on storage costs, while combining data from multiple repositories so it is housed in the same environment, is separated by custodian, can be quickly and easily searched and placed into a case if necessary. 

So, your organization might have concluded that you need to migrate the archived data from Enterprise Vault, into Microsoft 365.  

The question is: 

How does my organization migrate all its legacy Enterprise Vault archived data to Microsoft 365? 

Essentially, there are three approaches: 

• Manually extracting Data to PST files and using a tool to import them into M365 
• Manually copying PST files onto hard drives, then shipping them to Microsoft 
• Utilizing a fully-featured Enterprise Vault Migration Tool / Product / Solution 

Let’s go into each of these in some more detail. 

Manual / Enterprise Vault Migration Tools

This approach consists of two steps: Extracting the data to PST and getting that PST data into Microsoft 365. 

To extract the data to PST, you would use the Enterprise Vault Export Archive Wizard. This gives you a few options when it comes to exporting the data. For example, you can export items that are from a particular time frame, have a selected retention category, or are located in a specific folder. Of course, you can also export the whole archive. The tool can’t do everything for you though. If you have SharePoint archives or public folder archives, you can’t use the Export Archive Wizard. 

When it comes to importing the data from Enterprise Vault into Microsoft 365, there are three options:

PST Importer via Network

• Clients upload the PST files created by the Export Archive Wizard over their network to a temporary Azure storage location.  
• Use the Microsoft 365 Import Service to import the PST data to mailboxes in your Microsoft 365 tenant.

Although this Enterprise Vault migration tool is free, there are daily upload limits when adding the data to Azure, and using Azure to store the PST data might incur data transfer and storage costs. 

Drive Shipping

• Copy the PST files that were created by the Export Archive Wizard to BitLocker encrypted hard drives.
• Physically ship the drives to Microsoft.
• Microsoft personnel will upload the data to a temporary Azure storage location. 
• Use the Microsoft 365 Import Service to import the PST data to mailboxes in your Microsoft 365 tenant. 

This approach is not free; Microsoft charges in the region of $2000 per terabyte. Drive shipping also adds the extra complexity of having hard drives in transit, sometimes for an extended period.  Best practices dictate not to delete the PST data from your on-premises environment until Microsoft has completed its ingestion of your data. 

This migration approach requires granular management and detailed reporting. Both Enterprise Vault and M365 require tasks that would need to be done manually. 

Full-featured Enterprise Vault Migration Tool

There is much more to data migration than just copying data new generations of migration solutions have begun to harness the scalability, flexibility, and intelligence of the cloud and can perform migrations quickly and at a lower cost than outdated tools. Some of the things that your organization will need to do to successfully complete a migration from Enterprise Vault to Microsoft 365 are:

• Progress reporting: Provides updates on how the project is moving forward, including any related or unresolved issues. 
• User communication: Keep users up to date around what is happening with their data. 
• Proper preparation for moving the data repositories: If you’re moving legacy data from Enterprise Vault to Microsoft 365, here are some tasks should be performed to ensure a smooth transformation: 
  • Copying the data. 
  • Performing onboarding tasks on Microsoft 365: For example, setting mailbox quotas or message size limits, enabling personal archive mailboxes, and assigning licenses.  
  • Performing retirement tasks on Enterprise Vault. For example, deleting Enterprise Vault email shortcuts to tidy up the mailbox.

Which Approach Is Best?

It’s easy to see that the manual approach of copying the data is prone to errors and cumbersome for an IT or infrastructure team to perform. A full-featured Enterprise Vault migration tool should be able to do more than simply migrate data to ensure the whole project is handled end-to-end.  

At Cloudficient, we perform all of the steps covered, and much more, with EVComplete. Based on our ReMAD platform and 100% cloud-based, our Enterprise Vault migration tool has minimal on-premise requirements. At the heart of the platform is a workflow orchestration engine that has over 100 individual steps that can be combined and customized to suit your unique project requirements. By following a customized workflow, Cloudficient ensures that your migration will be successful and performed up to your standards. 

Get Started Today

At Cloudficient, we spend a lot of time ensuring that Enterprise Vault migration, onboarding, expiration and other enterprise transformation projects remove as much risk as possible. That’s why we always suggest doing a proof of concept with your users, in your environment, and with your data.  

With unmatched next generation migration technology, Cloudficient is revolutionizing the way businesses retire legacy systems and advance their organization into the cloud.  By assisting businesses in adopting the cloud, including our   our business constantly remains focused on Enterprise Vault to Microsoft 365 migration service, 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 Enterprise Vault migration project, visit our website, or contact us.