The costs, inconvenience, timescales & compliance issues that typically surround archive migration can be prohibitive and can mean many organizations get locked into legacy archives…..

As an aside, if you migrate to a new system but leave your legacy archive service ‘in situ’ you will end up maintaining ‘islands of data’ that are difficult and costly to manage and access, both for staff and compliance auditors.  

Typical issues surrounding a migration include:

COST/TIME TO MIGRATE - The ‘built in’ (native) mechanisms that most archive vendors offer to their customers for extracting data from their archives tends to be labour-intensive and therefore extremely costly.

They usually rely on PST files as a common interim format, the theory being that once extracted into PST files, the data can then easily be imported into a new archive using PST ingestion routines, or even put back into Exchange.

PST files, however, are as notoriously bad for the task of migration as they are in providing reliable ‘overspill’ email storage for Outlook users.  For example:

• Large PST files are prone to corruption: This creates big problems for organizations trying to extract the contents of very large mailbox archives or Journal mailbox archives,
• PSTs are space-inefficient: This means you’ll need lots of extra storage to pre-stage your data.
• PST files are slow to write to: Added to this the fact that native extractions are typically single threaded processes which need to be manually overseen (i.e. you could not leave several mailboxes running unattended overnight), it probably won’t surprise you to learn that organisations have been known to take many dedicated man months to extract even a modest amount of data using native, PST-based migration tools.

NON-COMPLIANCE- The other MAJOR PROBLEM with the manual PST-based route to migrate data is that the reliance on human accuracy, interim storage and multiple steps involved make it difficult (if not impossible) to maintain reliable chain-of-custody and discoverability of the data.  This means organizations risk being non-compliant with respect to their email records. 

NEGATIVE IMPACT ON BUSINESS – The other challenge facing organizations that would like to migrate is whether data can be moved without compromising accessibility to end users.  If a user can no longer retrieve their data in the usual way from a shortcut, they will create a huge overhead on the IT team, lose hours of productivity and potentially lose vital information because they can not longer find it easily.