Why It’s Important To Consider Your Archive And Compliance Data As Part Of Your Migration To Office 365
Guest Post By Sean Nicholson Of SoftwareONE
Organizations across the world are adopting Microsoft Office 365 faster than ever before. One of the first considerations we help businesses and IT teams explore is, “what will you do with your archive data?”
Historically, to maintain compliance with internal policies and external regulatory requirements, organizations invested in an on-premises email archive solution to move data from high speed (high cost) storage used for Microsoft Exchange servers, to slower (lower cost) additional storage. Despite server virtualization, there are real costs associated with deploying on-premises servers. There are not only licensing costs involved, but also costs associated with facilities, server resource consumption and support infrastructure (such as the required ongoing monitoring and patching). As such, there is almost always a significant investment associated with an on-premises solution.
Email archive solutions have been in place for years, typically being upgraded in-situ and storing an ever increasing amount of items. With studies suggesting that nearly 75% of an organization’s intellectual property is contained within email and messaging systems, it means it’s important to protect and retain this data. Whilst it’s possible to leave the on-premises archive solution where it is, and start users with a new archive in Office 365, it will impact the user experience as they will now have multiple locations for accessing archived email. Providing virtually unlimited storage, eDiscovery, auditing and legal hold tools, Microsoft Office 365 is a viable solution to allow organizations to fully remove the legacy on-premises email archive solution, whilst retaining the potential intellectual property contained within it.
There are many factors that need to be considered before moving business data from an existing archive solution to Office 365. Organizations may face specific email retention policies imposed by an industry regulator, increasing the complexity of migrations as chain-of-custody must be preserved. Because of the volume of data held in archives, if not deployed for regulatory compliance purposes, an organization may decide that moving all of the data within the email archive solution may not be necessary, or for example, that the archived items should not be migrated when the user shortcut has been deleted from the mailbox (and indication that the item is no longer required by the user).
Having helped over 3.2 million users access Office 365, working with thousands of customers across the world, SoftwareONE understands that, when exporting data from email archive solutions, it’s important to have the ability for high-speed transfer of information with error-checking and reporting capabilities. We also need the ability to assure our customers that the chain of custody for data is maintained during the transfer, that the same people have access and that the data hasn’t been tampered with. Being able to prove that the migration has been completed accurately protects the organization from negative legal repercussions.
To meet these needs and provide the best user experience for our customers, we selected Transvault as the tool of choice for the SoftwareONE Email Archive Migration Service. Powering the Email Archive Migration Service with Transvault means that we’re able to deliver a comprehensive, seamless archive migration strategy that is quick and efficient, enabling our customers to meet email records retention and regulatory compliance needs whilst benefiting from everything the Cloud has to offer.
We’re delighted to be working with such an experienced migration solution vendor as Transvault and look forward to many future successes together!