Why I Joined Cloudficient

Delivering Cloudficiency Around Future Cloud Transformation and Organizational Change

As I considered a multitude of available alternatives, Cloudficient stood out as the most interesting to me.  On the surface this may not seem to make sense, given today, Cloudficient mostly handles on-premise migrations to the Cloud – surely this is a diminishing market, right?  And that is absolutely where the answer starts, but it gets much, much, more interesting from there…

The market for handling predominantly email and archive based on-premise migrations to the Cloud is one that has been around for over two decades.  Over the years, there’s been lots of change and back and forth in this space.  For example, early on, and even as recently as 5+ years ago, organizations commonly migrated from email archive to email archive.  Within the last 5 years this has declined with the majority of migrations directed toward Office 365 and/or Cloud Archiving solutions.  Suffice to say, archive migrations are an old market, with many aging migration technologies, driven by even more antiquated email archiving technologies!

With the contrast of technologies in the market being quite dated, this is where my initial interest in Cloudficient was peaked.  Founded by Peter Kozak, co-founder and the former CEO of Quadrotech (now part of Quest) as well as the main architect of Archive Shuttle, and alongside an amazing team of technology experts, Cloudficient has built the only next generation and pure Cloud born migration technology on the market.  Technically speaking, Cloudficient has built a Kubernetes orchestrated cloud microservices migration platform offering truly unlimited scale – it’s simply unmatched by anything on the market. 

On top of Cloudficient’s next generation migration platform is a comprehensive end to end customizable workflow technology of which “archive migrations” are but a small part.  With more than 100 pre-defined steps, automated workflow templates enable defining a customized onboarding process which maps directly to desired business requirements for the migration (ex. End user communication, O365 licensing and provisioning, Exchange mailbox moves, Enterprise Vault migration and deprovisioning, home-drive to OneDrive migrations, etc.).  Cloudficient consultants will commonly customize workflow templates to orchestrate migrating on-premise Exchange mailboxes as well as Enterprise Vault archives.

Adapting to Challenges – The Advantages of Being Nimble!

Of course, declaring you have the latest and greatest is easy, but where’s the proof?  We think proof comes through the ability to adapt to change.  Flexibility is absolutely critical in the migration space where, for example, Microsoft recently introduced “Service Protection Throttling” (SPT) which has or will impact ALL migrations to Office 365.  Implemented to ensure the performance of a single tenant during a migration doesn’t impact other tenants, Service Protection Throttling (SPT) imposes a new data ingestion "speed limit" of 150 MB per 5 minutes per mailbox on Office 365 tenants.  In discussions with customers conducting standard mailbox moves manually, some have been forced to pause their migration due to significantly impacted performance.  Leveraging our next generation architecture, once the challenge was understood, Cloudficient rapidly implemented a solution that will automatically scale, enabling the technology to meet and in most cases exceed prior migration speeds!

Unfortunately, Microsoft isn’t done yet and has formally announced further changes coming soon.  Starting in April 2021 (we assume this isn’t an April Fools prank) emails will additionally be throttled for recipients that exceed the Microsoft published and established threshold of 3,600 messages per hour.  While a soft limit in the past, Microsoft will be phasing in this limit come April.  If a mailbox exceeds the established limit, messages to that mailbox will be throttled until the limit resets one hour from when the threshold was exceeded.  The Cloudficient team is already researching what modifications, if any, will be required to address this change.  We are extremely confident that a combination of our next generation architecture along with advising customers and partners early in the migration planning phases will result in a net zero impact to our migration velocity.

Still, even if you willingly concede Cloudficient has cutting edge migration technology, you may wonder why it matters – what are you going to do with it?

Well, the reality is in the short term there are still lots of organizations onboarding to Office 365 – certainly more than I expected three or four years ago!  For these organizations, Cloudficient aims to provide an end-to-end solution that addresses the business requirements of onboarding to Office 365 more completely than anything on the market.  That’s something we’re happy to underwrite via something we always recommend to potential customers – Always do a Proof of Concept (POC)!  When considering the significant costs of a migration project – why would you not want to certify a successful outcome prior to making a substantial investment?

Beyond Office 365 Onboarding

Near term, in the present pandemic landscape, companies facilitating mergers and acquisitions will most likely accelerate and even if not, this will certainly continue to be a significant market moving forward.  Formally known as the Cloudficient ReMAD platform, the next generation technology I’ve been referencing throughout, represents Restructuring, Mergers, Acquisitions, & Divestitures!  Presently, all Cloudficient technologies are built on this platform and it was specifically designed for innovation in this sector.  Our objective is to bring the same level of end-to-end solution workflows yielding a unique, integrated, and streamlined offering that we expect will resonate significantly within the market.  Cloudficient additionally expects to go way beyond simply migrating popular workloads helping companies accelerate the entire business process end to end.  Watch this space as Cloudficient will most certainly have more coming very, very soon!

Further out, but certainly not so far off, Cloudficient is absolutely thinking about how migrations will look in the coming years.  At a minimum, as organizations seek the latest eDiscovery and search technologies appropriate for their business, we expect the need for Cloud-to-Cloud migrations to grow alongside merger, acquisition and divestiture scenarios.  We also suspect that larger organizations will grow more and more reluctant to easily relinquish control of large pools of business critical data, willingly locking themselves into conditions extremely difficult to change.  It may certainly be the case that the next generation of migration is, wait for it… no migration – is there a potential Final Destination?  Time will tell!

In conclusion, the need for migrations isn’t going away but will certainly change moving forward.  We suspect the migration market is on the precipice of a significant shift – one that will reset the game and enable new technologies and different strategies to bubble straight to the top.  In a nutshell, I joined Cloudficient because I believe they have the right combination of technology and strategy not just to handle migrations of today, but for the future.