We live in a DIY world where Google, YouTube and their cohorts turn us into authorities. We can now perform tasks we would previously have paid an expert to handle. How often have you tried this DIY approach and then had to call in the expert? Ever tried it with an Email Archive Migration? There are indeed some use cases where this approach is OK although they are very few and far between.
You might think that doing an archive migration yourself will save your company time and money. Install the third party tool and away you go.
Consider this:
- Knowledge: Organisations seldom have archive migration specialists as a part of their everyday IT team – there are probably less than 100 people on the planet with these specialist skills. Not having the right knowledge to deliver the right outcome is detrimental.
- Not understanding where you’re coming from or where you’re going to: Like most things, the devil is in the detail. A transformation project like an archive migration is more difficult because inexperience has it that people don’t know what they need to do in order to successfully shift the data in the right way.
- Data loss: If you don’t have a well-defined methodology and processes there is no way to guarantee that you’ve migrated all data. Worse… you won’t know until it’s too late.
- Time: Inexperience leads to lengthy project times while your team learns to do something that you are likely to only ever do once.
- Cost: Not knowing how long a migration will take means of not knowing how many resources you will need. Five years later you could still be in the beginning stage of your migration and have spent tens of thousands (this is a true story).
- User experience and internal infrastructure: A piece of software to perform a migration does not tell you how to have a fantastic user experience or how to ensure the little impact to your environment.
- Compliance: If you need a compliant based migration of data, the legal ramifications of this being done incorrectly can have the potential to cripple your company. The smallest mistake could result in the largest problem trouble for your company.
Put away your migrations for dummies books (yes this really happened) and come and talk to Insentra today. We can help you avoid these pitfalls and give you the guidance you need to get the best outcome – a well-managed migration of your critical data.
