Interestingly a Partner was recently asked to revisit a migration they’d ‘completed’ 3 years ago. Back then, the customer had asked to exclude leavers’ data and anything over 10 years old. More recently the customer’s legal team decided they would not rest easy until they’d mopped up the remaining email.

Luckily, the customer had the foresight to keep a backup of their original archive and the TransVault SQL database from the original migration. This, combined with that fact that TransVault creates a forensic record of what is and isn’t moved in any ‘migration pass’, meant the residual data could be accurately identified and accounted for in the eyes of their legal team.

Projects like this, and even our growing PST migration project pipeline, are all indicators that our customers are becoming email hoarders and not wanting to leave anything to chance. 

3^rd-Party Archive Platforms Will Fall by the Wayside

The increasingly acquisitive market in which archiving vendors operate has seen customers leaping between archive platforms like polar bears between melting ice floes. It seems that each time a new owner gets involved with an established archiving product, there’s a reduced quality of support or poor product development roadmap that gives customers cold feet. 

Although we’re seeing no signs of archiving colossus, Veritas (formerly Symantec), reducing their focus on Enterprise Vault, even a small wobble in confidence is a powerful motivator and could drive more traffic in Microsoft’s direction.

We've recently heard Dell is reassuring its EMC SourceOne customers that it will put a renewed focus on their archiving system.  The company is undoubtedly concerned about the attrition of its SourceOne installed base, and no wonder, as last year we saw migrations out of SourceOne quadruple (in comparison to the year before).  Our 6 year history of EMC archive migrations has enabled us to accurately measure such trends. 

As covered in earlier blogs, we’ve also seen plenty of multi-hop action (not just twice but even three times) within the same enterprise, combined with a trend towards customers moving their 3rd-party archives back into ‘native’ Exchange.

As I write this I'm near New York City where I've been visiting a huge customer that has been migrating its entire on-prem archives to a new on-prem infrastructure, but they’re already open to the idea of another move - this time to Microsoft's cloud. Similarly, a mid-West city government started migrating their 50 TB legacy CAMM archive to Enterprise Vault, but started to plan a migration into Office 365 before the project was complete.

Even though Microsoft’s search and discovery capability is arguably lagging behind what is featured in many 3^rd party archives, this inconvenience is outweighed by the attraction of lower costs and having everything in one place with one monthly subscription payment. There’s also a sense of security that being with Microsoft can bring. Or is there?

There’ll be lots of Cloud Hopping

Two years ago, a migration from a ‘master-of-your-own-destiny’ on-premises system into Office 365 was only for the more pioneering (brave) enterprises.  

In the last year alone, Office 365 migrations have become more than 50% of our business! We’re talking BIG organizations, with a significant number of US state and city government bodies and most recently banks, who are using our Compliance TimeMachine feature to move their legacy email journal archives into Office 365.

We’re also witnessing some inter-cloud migrations, with TransVault Partners being asked to migrate customer emails between different Office 365 organizations, as well as move email records from different vendors’ clouds into Office 365.  http://www.essential.co.uk/blog/project/city-guilds-switches-email-clouds/.

It's important to note though that Cloud archive vendors usually levy big charges for taking your data out of their systems.  Note the comments about HP and Global Relay particularly in this Gartner report at <http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-2QY57QV&ct=151029&st=sb>

So, picking up on my third ‘what if’ headline – you may (or may not) be surprised to hear we’ve got a few Office 365 extraction projects on the horizon. Unlike all the other cloud vendors, Microsoft are as free and open with their extraction protocols as with those for ingestion. This is important:

• How does an enterprise with a policy for on-prem archiving and eDiscovery manage the acquisition of another that uses Office 365 archiving?
• How do you selectively merge two different organisations that both use Office 365? 

Consider all of the potential permutations and you can see that TransVault's technology can offer the solutions.

My Best Advice

In short, if I were to give one piece of advice to an enterprise moving to the cloud or any other platform, it would be: check the options (and costs) for getting your data out in case the unthinkable happens.  

I’ll be speaking more on the subject of cloud-hopping shortly.

To conclude - I don’t know if you saw the recent video by our product manager Steve Dagless? You must. http://bit.ly/1R1cLBT 

It was a light-hearted take on the fact that, regardless of what happens in the future, we are committed to looking after the integrity and accessibility of your email record.

So coming back to the opener to this piece. Who knows what the future will bring? 

This is why we always have, and will continue to develop TransVault with the future in mind.