How to Successfully Migrate Legacy Data

In this blog, I want to tell you more about how you can successfully migrate legacy data from an on-premise system to Office 365. For us, at Cloudficient, there is so much more to it than just copying the data. It’s why our solutions, based on our tried and proven ReMAD platform, have so many additional tasks that they perform.

Let’s start by working our way through some definitions:

What is Legacy Data?

Legacy data can mean different things to different people and organizations. For this article, though, we’ll think of legacy data as:

• PST files
• Corporate email
• Home drives
• Enterprise Vault email archives

Some of those data silos might have ‘live’ data in them as well as legacy data. Take, for example, corporate email mailboxes and home drives. These are likely to have recent data in them and backups of files from many years ago that have remained untouched since they were created. That’s okay, provided during the data migration process we can ensure seamless access for users and good communication to keep users informed of what is changing.

What is Legacy Data Migration?

In this blog, we are talking about data migration. However, there are other options if you don’t want to migrate it all – one of the solutions, Expireon, can help with expiring some data during a digital transformation project.

Data migration means that we will take all the data in a particular silo and copy it to Office 365. The part of Office 365 will depend on the data, and in some cases, there are choices and decisions to be made as the data could potentially be migrated to one of several targets. As an example, let’s say we’re going to use these targets:

• PST files -> Office 365 Personal Archive
• Corporate email -> Office 365 mailbox
• Home drives -> OneDrive for Business
• Enterprise Vault email archives –> Office 365 Personal Archive

It’s worth pointing out that in these cases we’re not doing a legacy systems migration. That would involve transitioning the system itself into the cloud – we are doing data migration, leaving the system behind.

What we’ve done with the above bulleted list is we’ve decided the best approach for data migration for each type of data that we want to migrate. The definition of ‘best’ will be subjective, and some organizations may choose a different target. This process of selecting the best approach can and should be repeated for each data silo and each type of data to be migrated.

Is Data Migration Hard?

As we’ve discussed in other blogs, there are two approaches to migrating legacy data:

• Manual / Tool
• Full-featured migration tool

In another blog, we’ve talked at length about how legacy data migration is so much more than just copying the data.

Can data migration be done manually?

Absolutely, but there are so many advantages to using a full-featured data migration tool that we won’t consider the manual approach in this article.

Using a full-featured data migration tool makes the process much easier and reduces project risk. Also, when you partner with Cloudficient, you’re getting 100+ years of experience in this type of activity. It’s essential to engage with a specialist team like ours to ensure the success of your project.

If you'd like to find out more about bringing cloudficiency to your project, reach out to us.

What Does a Successful Legacy Data Migration Look Like?

Some people say that the legacy data migration is successful if all the data is migrated to the target system, in this case Office 365. At Cloudficient, we believe that there is a lot more to ‘success’ than that. For example:

• What is the end-user experience like during the data migration and afterwards?
• Have users been kept informed of the progress of the migration? Not the overall progress of the project; the progress of their data migration.
• Do users know after the migration where their data is and is it easy for them to access it?
• In any legacy data migration, there are always some items that cause errors, have they been sufficiently investigated?
• Has the source environment and systems been cleaned up?
• Have all the data repositories been migrated?

Each organization will also have some of its own requirements when it comes to measuring success. Think about what success means for your organization and your user population.

Why Do You Need Data Migration Services?

It’s clear that there are many steps involved in a data migration project. While the steps can be done manually, it makes much more sense for enterprise organizations to enlist the services of a Data Migration Specialist, like Cloudficient. The two biggest reasons are

• Experience
• Proven success with proven technology 

The experience we bring to your project comes from thousands of successful data migration projects over the last two decades. This means that we can address concerns quickly, and we understand that each project is unique and has unique requirements.

We also have proven success with many customer testimonials. Our next-generation cloud-based ReMAD platform powers all our solutions and becomes the command center for your digital transformation project. Consider that earlier in the article, we introduced four data silos that we want to migrate. In the recent past, you might have had to work with four different solutions from four different vendors to complete the project.  That’s not the case with us, as we have solutions based on our platform that address each of these with the same familiar interface, and the same robust processing under the hood.

With unmatched next generation data migration technology, Cloudficient is revolutionizing the way businesses retire legacy systems and transform their organization into the cloud. Our business constantly remains focused on client needs and creating product offerings that match them. We provide affordable services that are scalable, fast and seamless.

If you would like to learn more about how to bring Cloudficiency to your legacy data  migration project, visit our website, or contact us.