The Ramifications of Not Exercising a Cohesive Archiving and Migrating Strategy: Part 1

Today, we live in a very large world of mergers, acquisitions and divestitures, all of which can result in organizations that have multiple platforms and data stored in many different locations. It's a puzzle of complexity and idiosyncrasies where the pieces don't necessarily all fit together and, at times, don’t make corporate sense.

The reality is that most companies have multiple locations, remote workers and an increasing amount of data to protect, define policies around, and retain. This is especially true when you have multiple solutions to manage multiple data types and sources. For every solution, you pay for licensing, utilities and maintenance fees. Add to that the expense of expert staffing for each system, and you are looking at exorbitant costs.

Most importantly, these businesses need one singular platform where their data safely resides and is legally defensible. Not only does the data need to be securely archived, but it also needs to have the ability to migrate from one corporate owner to another, or from one platform to the next.

Simplification makes companies more efficient. Migrating to just one system or one solutions provider or a single partner of record will significantly reduce your costs. Organizations are making the move to cloud-based solutions to get rid of things in their local environment. For example, there could be something that has been kicking around for five years, and the tech that took care of it left four years ago. Now, staff members are just maintaining something that they had no hand in enabling or validating. Migration offers the opportunity for less complexity and an overall savings, making you look like the company hero!

Finally, you must be an advocate for your customers' data. Healthcare providers and financial institutions are subject to very strict data retention requirements, and failing to adhere to those rules can have severe financial and legal consequences. You don’t want to be the IT person who not only cost your company unwarranted money, but also opened the organization to a legal issue because you couldn’t secure, retain, or easily access and restore much needed data.

Organizations must ensure that all their information is going to be accurately and efficiently transferred. Whether it takes the form of legacy email that has been stored, tape backups or voice data, all that data must be held, compliant, and with the full assurance of corporate governance. When data is moved, there must be no risk that it has been disrupted or modified. With all the stress involved in migration and archiving, some may wonder if such a shift or move is worthwhile. It definitely is, especially when you consider the cost savings achieved when decreasing your overall hardware and software footprint, reducing data maintenance fees and increasing your ability to centrally manage all your data--both legacy and new, from a single source or location.

In the next installment, we will discuss how you can achieve a successful migration.

Perry Hiltz is a Senior Sales Engineer at Trusted Data Solutions (TDS) with over 18 years of technical pre-sales engineering knowledge. Hiltz began working in IT in 1993 and has been working with email and messaging since 1997. With experience in Domino, Exchange and migrations between the two, Hiltz has built respect and a wealth of knowledge surrounding email. His knowledge of these migrations led him to migrations from enterprise archives to messaging platforms and other enterprise archives. Hiltz currently works within TDS’ Enterprise Archive Migration team in assisting partner organizations with training, support, and technical demonstrations.