Review Of Generations Of Archive Migration Solutions

In this video Steve takes us through some of the details around the three different generations of archive migration solutions. He'll cover:

• How Cloudficient is uniquely positioned to offer a view on the different types of solution
• Drawbacks of some of the older solutions
• How EVComplete and Onboarding 365 Complete change the way that organizations can transform their business to the cloud.

Below is a transcript of the video:

Hi and welcome,

For organizations moving to the cloud, feeling confident about how to migrate your Enterprise Vault archive is often a daunting endeavor. I’m Steve and today I’d like to provide an in-depth, open and transparent review of how Cloudficient views the archive migration technology landscape for those seeking to migrate to Office 365.

The archive migration market is a mature one with many established vendors, partners, and technologies.  There are three technology vendors who handle nearly all archive migration projects.  The good news is all three have technologies that will absolutely work, but with key distinctions which should be considered. 

To easily compare and contrast which will best support your project, we’ve categorized these technologies into a generational timeline. 

The first generation solutions have been around for over 15 years.

Of course they do work, but there are several drawbacks to more recent solutions as we’ll see.

They usually consist of powerful hardware ‘in the middle’ of the source and target environments. Typically, all data flows through that powerful, central migration server.

Scaling these environments is a costly exercise that introduces lots more costly equipment to manage. It also means that there is no single-pane-of-glass view when it comes to looking at the overall progress of the project. With these type of solution it’s hard to actually do a cohesive migration.

Eventually the bottleneck becomes that server, or those servers, in the middle.

No matter how powerful you make it, and at a huge cost, it will likely not meet the demands of a large migration project. In fact in large projects you will most likely need several of those servers as we see here.

These first generation solutions typically offer little or no process workflow to complete all the steps needed in migration. This means that your IT team might be involved in doing repetitive tasks and spending a large amount of time consolidating reporting information to track the progress of the migration.

This generation of solution usually doesn’t offer any pure cloud capabilities. The hardware is deployed in your data-center which in itself can lead to delays in large organizations.

The second generation solutions have been around for about 10 years and have some distributed agent technology which helps with scalability. Many of these solutions separate out the meta-data from the actual data. This certainly helps with general scalability and administration. However these types of solution, like the first generation ones, typically require powerful hardware.  A key point to note is that they typically still require significant on premise resources and a powerful SQL server.

These solutions also have a clear distinction between data and metadata.

The data usually flows directly from the source to the target, which helps protect and ensure security of the data. 

We see the data flow in this graphic in blue.

Metadata flows from the source to a centralized database running on SQL Server.

We see the metadata flow in this graphic in orange.

It’s that SQL server which eventually becomes the bottleneck in migration projects.

These types of systems have some limited process workflow which can help automate some of the migration steps. Your IT team might still be left with some aspects of the migration that they have to perform such as assigning appropriate licenses or enabling personal archive mailboxes.

Again these types of solution typically have no pure cloud capability.

It’s also worth pointing out that recent migration vendor acquisitions in this space could lead to problems securing resources to deliver customer projects.

The third type of solution we term ‘next generation’. These are relatively new solutions. Our EVComplete and Onboarding 365 Complete are in this category.

These types of solution use distributed agent technology and cloud microservices to fully orchestrate the migration project. They offer end to end workflow potential and have their ‘brain’ hosted in a scalable cloud architecture.

If on premise resources are required they are typically minimal in nature and these types of solution, because of their scalability, don’t have any of the bottlenecks identified with the other solutions.

EVComplete offers truly unlimited scale, resources spin up on demand with no bottlenecks or single points of failure.

Our solution has end-to-end process workflow which means that you can do all those other activities that are necessary as well as moving the data. We always see that moving the data is only a very small part of the overall process.

EVComplete is the only pure cloud archive migration technology on the market at this time. Take a look at some of our other blogs to see how we fit into cloud infrastructure and can scale to meet any project demands. We’ve also got some additional videos scheduled on this topic.

We have dedicated delivery resources to ensure your project starts quickly, and to ensure successful project completion. In fact, not only do we have dedicated resources, but our company has almost a century of experience in performing migrations when you combine our resources!

As well as the things we’ve mentioned here about architecture, there are many more things to consider when selecting a migration technology.

• Comprehensive end to end migration workflow capabilities,
• The ability to handle Microsoft Service Protection Throttling,
• And conducting a Proof-of-Concept to validate the solution

are certainly at the top of the list.  

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 servicing client needs and creating solution offerings that match them.

If you would like to learn more about how to bring Cloudficiency to your migration project, please visit our website: cloudficient.com