Anglia Ruskin University chooses bluesource & Transvault for Microsoft 365 migration

ARU is a leading UK university with students from 185 countries and campuses in Cambridge, Chelmsford and Peterborough. ARU has been named as one of the top 350 institutions in the world in The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2023 and is in the top 15% in the country for graduate employment.

As part of its broader digital strategy, ARU made the decision to migrate to Microsoft Office 365 – a complicated task as its data was residing in Enterprise Vault (EV).

Whilst EV is a good archiving system, it does not support mailboxes that are hosted in Office 365, so its core archiving functionality would no longer be available after the migration. ARU looked at the option of migrating EV archived data using EV native tools.

Due to the way EV works, it was also thought that the migration would need to consist of two core activities:

• Extraction of EV archives into relevant PST files
• Ingestion of the PST files into the Office 365 mailboxes

ARU had some challenges with the native tools approach:

• The migration would not be end to end.
• The reporting is very limited with native EV tools.
• The extraction does not provide the ability to bypass failed items.
• The extraction used the same processes used by the end users when accessing EV archived data, and as a result, there can be a drop in application performance.

The ultimate challenge arose with regard to EV shortcuts, as the native tool was inadequately configured for managing these.

As a leading European Partner of Transvault, we’ve been working with bluesource for over ten years, and together we’ve delivered over 170 successful migrations. bluesource has over 20 years of experience helping organisations better protect, govern, move and manage their data. We have an enviable client list of customers who see business benefit from investing in their data systems, tools and processes.

During the initial consultation meeting, bluesource provided a comprehensive overview of the migration process and explained the capabilities of the innovative Transvault Migrator tool. bluesource gave detailed explanations of the options available to ARU and were able to answer any questions ARU had. This was followed up by the production of a detailed planning and design document.

Find out more about bluesource’s migration service here.

Simon Harvey – Senior Cloud Systems Engineer, ARU, said, “We felt confident that bluesource had the relevant knowledge and expertise of the Transvault tooling and felt comfortable with their ability to migrate the data for us.

“Within a very short space of time, we realised that we could leave the team to manage the data migration on our behalf and felt we could trust them to alert us of any issues they encountered that they felt we should be aware of.

“We found the communication with the team was excellent. All queries and requests were responded to and dealt with in a timely manner. bluesource were very flexible and were always happy to alter migration schedules, even though sometimes they were at short notice.

“We had a few setbacks (primarily due to issues with Exchange online), and bluesource worked hard to keep us on schedule and gave us realistic (and what turned out to be accurate) timescales for when they anticipated getting back on track for the next batch of migrations.

Transvault makes the complex issue of Cloud Office migrations simple and seamless for our customers. We provide the fastest solution in the industry for email archive migrations from EV to Microsoft 365, with speeds approaching 6.7TBs a day. This is accomplished using our CloudStream service, combined with the latest Microsoft ingestion technologies and sophisticated algorithms.

We also provide complete auditing and support for EV journal archive migrations into the 365 compliance model. This allows organisations to move sensitive data with confidence and use Microsoft 365 as a one-stop-shop for retention management and eDiscovery.