Google Migrations

Transvault for Google is designed to migrate email content from myriad on-premise archive platforms directly into the Google cloud.  Examples of where Transvault can be used include:

• Migrating all or selected user archives into corresponding Gmail accounts
• Migrating email records into the Google Apps Vault service for long-term retention and eDiscovery

Transvault moves your email records in 1 step, directly from source to target via the Google API.

Using this approach, organisations are assured chain-of-custody.  It also eliminates the risks and overheads involved in manually-intensive, multi-hop migrations (e.g. using PST files).

You can use Transvault to perform selective migrations based on multiple criteria.  This intelligent approach means you take only the data you need and minimizes the time and cost of your migration.

Ensuring a seamless as possible experience for end users is also paramount, and Transvault includes advanced capabilities in this respect.  For example, you can migrate only the items for which a shortcut still exists in the user’s mailbox.

Importantly, your move is fully audited to ensure peace of mind and to meet business governance and legislative needs.

Google does not maintain a folder hierarchy in the same way that, say, Microsoft Exchange does.  Instead, it provides a ‘ view’ onto items based on Labels associated with those items.

To cope with this change, Transvault Migrator automatically detects the latest folder (and sub-folders) associated with the items in your source archive and creates the relevant Labels as it passes the item to the Google API.

Yes.  Prior to your Google Cloud migration Transvault helps analyse your existing archive usage – e.g. how much storage is being used, how many archive stores there are, the average mailbox size, total number of items, age, etc. Transvault then lets you be selective in what you migrate and to where. Examples include:

• Move only the data that users still have shortcuts to
• Move just the last n years-worth of data,
• Move data according to criteria including To, From, Subject, Folder, Attachment, Date etc

A migration to Google Cloud is therefore a great opportunity to significantly reduce the quantity of email you retain.

You can also implement demonstrable and audited migration policies to underpin any legislative requirement you have with respect to email retention.

Many third-party archive platforms offer the ability to export archived mailboxes to PST files, and Google offers tools to assist with PST file ingestion.

It’s tempting, therefore, to consider a manual approach that uses PST files as an interim format. There are many issues with this manual, PST-driven approach, which include:

• It’s slow and intensive. ‘Native’ archive extraction tools are typically single threaded and need to be manually overseen (i.e. you could not leave several mailboxes running overnight). This significantly increases the migration timeframe and manpower costs involved.
• There’s no error management. If an extract or import fails, the process stops with no indication of what the problem was and no ability to resume where the process left off or skip (and identify) just the items that fail.
• There’s no logging or auditing. With PSTs there is no record of what data has been moved. All checking of PST actions needs to be done manually and this is subject to human error.
• PSTs risk the security and integrity of your data. The multi-step process involved in PST led migrations means that files need to be held in an interim location for a length of time, during which they are potentially open to tampering. Chain-of-custody is broken as a consequence, making a PST-driven migration unsuitable for organizations that have a
  compliance remit.
• Large PST files are prone to corruption. This creates problems when extracting large archives.
• You’ll need lots of interim storage: You’ll need to set aside a large amount of space to pre-stage your data as it is migrated. Given that PSTs are notoriously space-inefficient and that you will lose single instance storage, this may be up to 10 times the size of your legacy archive.
• No ingestion flexibility. With the PST approach you will typically need to move all data in a mailbox – there’s rarely the ability to filter or be selective over what you extract or ingest. E.g. exclude any items in the \personal folder and any items >10 years old.

By comparison Transvault Migrator offers automated, multi-threaded, high-speed extraction with full error-logging and chain-of-custody. It also offers advanced data selection and mailbox management capabilities.

Yes. If you have licenced the Google Apps Vault service, you can migrate all or selected archived data into it.

For example, you might elect to migrate leavers’ mailboxes into the Vault service so that eDiscovery can be carried out on this data.

Similarly for any users that have in excess of 30GB in their combined archive and primary mailbox, you can create migration policies that place older data into the Vault service to avoid filling up the default 30GB of storage that is allocated to users (for both their Gmail and ‘Drive’ service).

Google imposes a limit of 1 item per second per mailbox when moving items into its service, however the multi-threaded nature of Transvault means that you can write to multiple mailboxes at once to get the optimum upload speeds.

As well as running multiple threads on a single server, multiple Transvault servers can be configured to operate in parallel to ensure that the performance of the Transvault services is never a limiting bottleneck on the duration of the project.

Your chosen archive migration partner can establish a proof of concept (POC) to establish likely throughput rates in your specific environment.

Transvault can filter items by user, user groups, folder and dates, thus enabling data to be incisively selected and migrated to Google or another destination.

Transvault also has the capability to re-write all email addresses in sender and recipient fields so that the email is usable with any new domain naming or recipient-addressing conventions.

Transvault Migrator can selectively migrate data based upon recipient addresses and domains so
it’s possible to migrate only a subset of journal data from a journal for example.