Are Your Customers Ready For Secure Archive Migration?

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

As organizations, including government and education, undergo infrastructure changes, they need to migrate huge amounts of data

A new white paper entitled Best Practices for Managing Archive Migrations, published by Osterman Research, offers advice, recommendations, and best practices for managing the entire archive migration process.

As IT organizations undergo infrastructure upgrades to respond to growing demands and shrinking budgets, they face the driving need to migrate huge amounts of data. The IDC reported that at the end of 2013, 60 percent of large enterprise IT projects consisted of data migrations. While necessary, data migration projects are notoriously difficult, time consuming, and costly when things go wrong.

In particular, government agencies, which deal with large amounts of highly sensitive data, are feeling growing pressure to upgrade their infrastructures while also maintaining the security of their information. Data breaches and lost data are unacceptable risks for such government agencies. 

Educational agencies are also bound by strict regulatory requirements that make migration of sensitive data more complicated.

According to the study, the three biggest concerns faced by organizations during data migrations include:

• The risk of downtime or extended downtime with the ensuing impact to the business
• The migration process itself and its impact on people and resources
• Large budget overruns due to the migration project

The study concludes that successful archive migration can be achieved by creating the most appropriate migration strategy and migration plan, fully understanding the capabilities and limitation of the current legacy archive, choosing the best migration software to match the operational and legal requirements, and communicating effectively with affected employees on a regular basis.

The study also warns that three of the biggest mistakes made by organizations when starting an archive migration project are:

• Not fully understanding the legacy archive technology
• Not fully understanding the legal and regulatory requirements for handling archived data
• Not taking into full consideration the impact of migration on end users, both during and post-migration

Ultimately, the study advises end users to choose the right migration vendor and/or archiving provider with a successful track record of migration projects.

The full report is available for download here.