Capita – Realising the potential of Cloud email archiving

Leading provider of business services migrates legacy emails into Microsoft Office 365

Customer
Capita
Partner
Essential
Source
EAS
Target
Microsoft Office 365
Data Size
25TBs
Product
Transvault Sprint

Migration Motivations

Part of the UK’s leading provider of business process management and outsourcing solutions, Capita provides IT and business services to over 3,800 customers across public and private sectors.

For its internal mail system, Capita had been using Autonomy EAS (now a Capax product) both to provide evidential email retention and to extend mailbox storage limits in Microsoft Exchange. With only 500 megabytes of mailbox space per user, EAS was absolutely crucial, effectively extending storage limits to gigabytes by replacing emails with much smaller shortcuts.

“As part of our strategy to modernise our own communication and collaboration capabilities we elected to switch to Office 365. As Office 365 offered us virtually limitless archive storage, maintaining our EAS archive on-premise seemed non-sensical.” Explained Ian Gates, Director of Internal IT at Capita

Having worked together on many previous customer projects, Capita approached messaging experts and award-winning Transvault partner, Essential Computing, to assist with the migration of their legacy archives into the cloud.

With over 25TB of data and an initial 13,000 mailboxes to move on a tight schedule, speed would be a vital factor, as well as, they discovered, being able to cope with complexity

The product had enough flexibility to handle our specific requirements and get us the speeds we were looking for in terms of throughput to Office 365. I would not hesitate in recommending this to anyone asked.

Ian Gates Director of Group IT Capita

High speed upload

The project included an extensive proof of concept which focused on maximising upload rates to the cloud. This aspect was challenging given that bulk imports into Office 365 can be subject to Microsoft throttling, network speeds and many other environmental factors.

Essential configured a multi-threaded Transvault environment such that throughput rates were in line with those of Capita’s live mailbox migrations. This meant that the two constituent parts of the overall email migration – migration of the primary Exchange mailbox and migration of the corresponding archive – were synchronous, and one would not delay progress of the other.

Coping with complexity

Another challenge in the migration was matching users’ existing archives to their new destination. This became tricky when a user possessed more than one archived mailbox in EAS, a scenario that could occur when an employee moved location, changed their name, or became a permanent member of staff (having previously worked as a contractor).

Essential was able to develop custom scripts for Capita’s specific requirements which solved the problem of matching users’ various sources with their new destination in the cloud.

Getting to Grips with Office 365

Asked about what benefits of their new cloud infrastructure Capita had realised so far, Gates commented, “User acceptance has generally been good – especially as we are still using the familiar Outlook interface.

Mainly, I would say that the new Office 365 service gives us confidence in terms of the speed and reliability of the service, as well as benefiting from the ability to search more mailbox content.”

Key Benefits

A flexible project approach

“Our overall experience of working with Essential was extremely positive. Their approach was to empower our own staff to get hands-on with the project wherever they could, this included organising web sessions with our migrations team in India.

The product had enough flexibility to handle our specific requirements and get us the speeds we were looking for in terms of throughput to Office 365. I would not hesitate in recommending this software, and indeed, Essential, as a service delivery partner, to anyone asked.”

Service Benefits

• Maximises upload speeds to Office 365 with multiple streams and unlimited scalability.

• Moves data in one step maintaining full chain-of-custody.

• Eliminates the costs associated with managing & maintaining legacy on-premise archives.

• Legacy shortcut management ensures total transparency for users post-migration. • Flexibility to cope with the most challenging of legacy archive environments.

• Selective migration helps reduce the amount of data that needs to be moved into the cloud.

Supported Platforms:

Supports migrations between many different platforms including:

• Veritas Enterprise Vault for Exchange

• Microsoft Exchange and Office 365

• Autonomy EAS for Exchange or Notes

• Autonomy Message Manager for Exchange or Notes (formerly CA Message Manager)

• Autonomy NearPoint (formerly Mimosa)

• EMC EmailXtender for Exchange or Notes

• EMC SourceOne for Exchange or Notes

• HP RISS

• HP IAP

• iLumin Assentor

• Metalogix Archive Manager (formerly Exchange@PAM)

• OpenText IXOS-eCONserver

• Quest Archive Manager

• PST, NSF, EML & MSG files

• Other hosted archive vendors including Mimecast, Enterprise Vault.cloud & Proofpoint.

New connectors are being added all the time or can be commissioned. Please contact Essential for details.

About Essential

Essential is regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on electronic messaging, email archiving & collaboration technologies.

During the last 20+ years Essential has been at the leading edge of providing expertise and solutions that allow enterprises to manage, optimise, integrate and migrate their mission-critical email, calendaring and directory systems.

As well as developing our own products, we are a reseller, training and support centre for a select range of best-of-breed authors. We are also one of Microsoft UK’s longest running accredited Gold Partner, and an EMC, Oracle and IBM business partner.

Our niche focus, proven track-record and reputation for support excellence means you can trust us to deliver enterprise-class solutions with the emphasis on functionality, scalability and flexibility.

Importantly, our inclusive approach to services, training and ongoing support means your own IT staff or chosen service provider is empowered to work with the solution, reducing your project costs and increasing productivity.

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