It’s crucial to have an in-depth understanding of your environment before you begin any type of data migration. Asking yourself the right questions when moving an email archive will provide an insight into what data you’ll be migrating and whether your infrastructure can accommodate the extraction process.
So what questions should you ask?
- How far does your archive go back?
- What types of data did it capture?
- What types of metadata did it capture?
- How much of this data do you need to transfer?
- Will your migration be cloud or on-premises?
- What types of data formats will your new system accept?
- What’s the maximum rate of ingestion?
These questions need to be asked before starting a migration project. Your data matters and the migration provides an opportunity to clean house – no point transferring data you don’t need. Having visibility into what data you have stored and what you need to move, transferring only what your organisation needs, can significantly reduce both the cost and speed of your migration.
Conducting a pre-project assessment isn’t just a good idea, it’s a must. This will provide a detailed picture of how much data exists in your archive, whether there is data which can be discarded rather than migrated and whether there are PSTs to include. The pre-project assessment also provides insights into any potential legal and compliance risks including the need to maintain chain of custody. Other questions resolved include the overall approach i.e. manual or automated, project costs and time frames.
By understanding the business requirements first and coupling this information with knowledge of the data stored, businesses can effectively formulate an overview of what should move and how. don’t forget to solicit advice from your compliance department and integrate their recommendations into your plan. Additionally, ensure you can communicate the plan to all parties likely to be affected.
Insentra have now completed over 140 archive migrations with over 30 years combined experience. We can help you plan your migration from start to finish. Get in touch with us today to see how we can ease the stress of your email archive migration.
