Email Archive Migration Fright Fest 2015
- By:
- Admin |
- November 13, 2015 |
- minute read
Happy Halloween! To help you get in the mood for all things strange, spooky or just plain kooky, today’s blog brings you the top ten most frightening email archive migrations that our team has ever encountered.
WARNING! The following are true stories of the most frightful email archive migration failures we’ve encountered over the past three years. Some readers may find details in this article distressing.
- A FTSE 100 global consumer goods company was moving away from SourceOne and needed to pull their 6TB of archived email back into Microsoft Exchange as part of their Office 365 migration.The original migration vendor migrated the SourceOne stubs to Office365, turning the messages into orphans, furthermore, the stub information was stripped from the message by the migration software, making Office365 rehydration impossible.
- A US regional bank worked with a vendor to migrate their 15TB of email archived in NearPoint to Enterprise Vault.After 9 months, hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars, only a handful of messages were successfully migrated.
- During a 50TB+ migration for a global conglomerate, the vendor associated the wrong archive user to the wrong Office 365 user, resulting in emails being migrated to the wrong user accounts.
- The migration vendor required more than100 servers to migrate approximately 150 TB of Enterprise Vault archived email to Office 365 at one of the top ten largest banks in North America.The vendor was asked to leave after one month of zero progress.
- Months after the migration project had been completed, this global organization realized that the migration software had corrupted all of the PST files that it had generated, extracting archived email from Enterprise Vault.
- A UK-based underwriting firm called “Time Out” after more than one year of working unsuccessfully with a vendor to migrate their 18TB of Autonomy EAS archived mail to another on-premise archiving systems.The result? A migration to Office365.
- A major engineering company based in the Middle East put their move to Office365 on hold after failing with three vendors to migrate their 5TB of SourceOne data – none of them were able to successfully rehydrate the SourceOne stubs.
- A vendor recommended moving this British construction company’s 24TBs of Enterprise Vault mail to the cloud, in order to migrate their archive to Office365.After 12 months with no success, the vendor was asked to leave.
- While migrating 5TB of archived mail from Autonomy EAS to Office 365 for a European local government, the vendor “fixed” a storage issue by moving the oldest mail to a new storage location – without telling the archive.The vendor was asked to leave as soon as the customer realized that some of their archived data was missing.
- One of the 20th largest banks in the world lost the credentials to connect to EMC Centera (where all their archived messages from Enterprise Vault were stored in Compliance Mode Plus), making extraction impossible.
The Sequel
I am happy to report that all of these stories do have happy endings. In every case, the company engaged Archive360 who was able to turn around an otherwise disastrous situation and get them migrated quickly, successfully and with 100% confidence. Remember the customer who was told that they needed more than 100 servers to complete their migration? Our project needed only three.
The Moral of the Story
If you’re in the market to migrate your archive, you need to get educated and ask lots of question of your prospective vendors.
- How many times have you successfully completed a migration that looks like mine?
- Can I speak to any customers that have migrated away from the archiving platform I have?
- How many migrations have you successfully accomplished using your technology?
- Can you explain in detail to my technical team how the archive is designed?
- Can you explain in detail to my legal/compliance team how you avoid spoliation when migrating stubs?
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