Planning an Email Archive Migration
Email archiving is best practice in many industries, but if you’re working in a heavily regulated sector like financial services, healthcare, energy, life sciences, education or government, it’s essential.
Whether you’re migrating your email archives to consolidate, centralize or provide greater security for your data, it’s important to plan properly to ensure the transfer is thorough and secure. Otherwise, you risk data loss, failure to comply with regulatory requirements and issues for end-users.
In this guide, we cover the fundamentals of migrating your email archive – what this entails, why it’s important and how to ensure you’re prepared.
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What is email archiving?
Put simply, archiving emails means storing them safely in a central location. An email archive securely and compliantly stores all the data and attachments from sent and received emails, so that they can be searched for and retrieved whenever they’re needed.
Before email archiving, emails were normally just stored in individual inboxes, with organizations often backing up data for disaster recovery. Anyone who has searched for an important email in their inbox knows how inefficient this is, with email chains, attachments and data being difficult to source. From an organizational perspective, it also may not be sufficiently secure.
Email archiving solves these issues – allowing businesses to quickly find emails and ensure that the data is securely stored.
Why is email archiving important?
We’ve touched on this above, but email archiving is important for a number of reasons, including:
- Storage management: It reduces the amount stored on mail servers. As the number of emails is constantly growing and email data is increasing in size, transferring the data to an archive reduces the pressure placed on the mail server. Emails can also be replaced by a stub or shortcut to the original message, reducing the amount of data without impacting email retrieval.
- Data retention and compliance: When properly archived, emails are stored in a separate location that protects companies from data loss and reduces the impact of data corruption – ensuring they stay compliant with legal and regulatory requirements.
- eDiscovery: Archiving simplifies Electronic Discovery (eDiscovery) – the process of searching, identifying, collecting and reviewing electronically stored data. It’s normally part of a legal request, so it’s important to stay compliant at all times.
- Disaster recovery: Separating email storage from the mail server means that data can be recovered in the event of a disaster. Downtime is minimized, with email data remaining fully available to users.
What is an email archive migration?
An email archive migration is the transfer of email data from one location to another, from one archiving platform or file format to another. There are numerous different variations, but no other email archive migration solution supports data migrations and shortcut management for as many archive versions and platforms as Transvault.
Archive vs mailbox migration
Although they both refer to the transfer of email data, archive and mailbox migrations are different things.
Archive migrations involve moving email data that has been stored on an archiving platform. This covers archived journal and end-user mailbox archive data.
Mailbox migrations involve moving live email data on a mail server like Microsoft Exchange. For example, transferring a mailbox from Exchange 2016 to M365.
Why would you migrate your archive?
Organizations evolve and compliance obligations and regulations change, meaning that new email platforms need to be adopted. As a result of this, migration should be taken seriously, and a failure to properly migrate archives can have serious legal, compliance and user productivity implications. Specific reasons for migration include:
- End of life: This occurs when an email archive becomes obsolete. For example, SourceOne has just reached its EOL date. At the end of its lifespan, software will no longer be developed or supported. This leads to security risks, as there will be no bug fixes, compatibility issues and no technical support. When this occurs, it’s time to migrate your archive.
- Wider digital transformation: Cloud-based archiving is the optimal choice for many organizations. It can save money, improve security and make compliance easier. If your organization is undergoing a digital transformation, archive migration is a key part of this.
- Cost: If an organization is managing their email archive storage with an on-premise account, it could be paying a lot to do so. On-premises email archive storage can be far more expensive than cloud storage. Secure on-premises storage requires costly hardware, as well as ongoing maintenance. Scalability is also more difficult, with more investment needed to expand capacity. There are also the costs of data extraction and hardware depreciation to factor in.
- Data consolidation: As storage resources age and become obsolete, organizations replace them with more advanced devices. Consolidation moves data to these new resources, reducing the amount of devices under management. Companies can also end up with multiple archives that may not be compatible with one another. This has implications for eDiscovery, costs and productivity, and consolidation moves data to a single archive that can drastically improve efficiency.
- Mergers and acquisitions: When a merger or acquisition occurs, there will be multiple archives that will need to work together. Consolidating migrates the archives, ensuring eDiscovery works across the merged companies.
- Compliance and regulatory obligations: To comply with litigation requirements, eDiscovery is essential. Early Case Assessment (ECA) involves reviewing case data and evidence that might be relevant to assess risk, cost and time requirements. This is an important process that’s used to decide whether to contest or settle a case. If an older archive has poor eDiscovery, this can have serious implications. Highly regulated industries have obligations to actively protect and audit the access of customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) and protected healthcare information (PHI). Older platforms weren’t built to provide these enhanced levels of security. Failure to correctly protect this information can lead to lawsuits, large fines and reputational damage.
Considerations for migrations
Migration is an important process. You should ensure that you go into it with a thorough understanding and an idea of challenges and future considerations.
On-prem vs Cloud
Some organizations can be daunted at the prospect of moving their archives from on-site to the Cloud. But migrating to the Cloud delivers numerous major benefits, including significant cost savings, technical and operational benefits and improved risk management.
Which Cloud platform?
You need to decide which Cloud platform to migrate to. This includes platforms like Microsoft Office 365, Arctera, ProofPoint, Jatheon and Mimecast.
Who should do the migration?
Due to concerns about the cost of migration or a desire to retain complete control over the process, it can be tempting to do the migration in-house. If you have the correct expertise and a full understanding of the process, a DIY migration can be a viable option. However, due to its complexity and the risks of getting a migration wrong, using a specialist like Transvault is the safest option.
What data?
When you undergo an email migration, you have an opportunity to audit the data that you want/need to retain. At Transvault, we also give you more transparency over the data as it moves – we keep you updated as to which data is moving during the process.
Challenges
What limitations are there on ingestion capabilities? Do you have sufficient bandwidth? Is there potential for data loss?
Compatibility
What format is the existing data stored in? Can it be converted?
Compliance
As we’ve discussed earlier, eDiscovery is vital for compliance. Will this be retained after the migration?
End users
How will the migration affect the end user? Will they be able to access the archive during migration? Will they be able to access and navigate easily once complete? What implications does this have on productivity? What training will be needed?
Preparing for an email archive migration
Being properly prepared is key to a successful migration. It’s a complicated process, so to make it as straightforward as possible, we’ve broken the process down into stages so you know what to expect before, during and after the migration.
Pre-Migration
As we’ve already mentioned, there are lots of things that can go wrong when migrating and a lot of considerations you need to take into account. Make sure you’ve been through these and how they might affect your organization before beginning the project. You’ll also need to define:
- Project objectives – what do you want to achieve? You should clearly outline the goals and objectives of the migration.
- Scope – what are you migrating? Identify the data that is to be moved. Which method will you be using? A staged, hybrid or complete migration?
- Stakeholder Identification – Communicate with all stakeholders involved in the migration.
- Risk assessment – what’s the potential for something going wrong? How would that affect your organization? It’s important to conduct a risk assessment at the outset and plan for any challenges.
- Budget and resources – how much will the migration cost, and what other resources will it involve? Allocate the budget and resources necessary.
- Timeline – how long will the process take? Does this have the potential to interfere with any other business objectives? Develop a detailed project timeline with key milestones and deadlines.
Migration Plan Development
After you’ve gone through the initial considerations, start developing your migration plan.
- Migration strategy – develop a detailed migration strategy based on the type of migration you’re planning. For example, will you go for a phased approach where you migrate emails in stages? Or an archive-first approach.
- Communication plan – ensure all stakeholders are kept up-to-date with any changes or effects that may impact them with a communication plan. Agree on who needs to be included and make a note of key deadlines and dates that stakeholders need to be aware of.
Infrastructure Preparation
Before the migration, you need to ensure that the infrastructure is suitably prepared.
- Migration environment setup – set up and configure the migration environment, using prerequisites defined in the statement of work (SOW). This can include things like the migration plan, strategies, process, backup/rollback and communications plan.
- Security configurations – make sure you implement your recommended security measures to ensure data isn’t compromised during the migration. This includes things like firewalls, access controls and vendor remote access.
Migration Validation
- Proof of Concept – planning is one thing, proving the concept is another. By performing a pilot migration, you can make any necessary adjustments before the full migration and ensure full buy-in from all stakeholders. A pilot migration involves a small-scale implementation that can identify any flaws before the full rollout.
After following these steps, you should be ready to implement the migration.
Email archive migration tips and best practices
With so much to consider, we’ve collected some email archive migration tips and best practices to help things run as smoothly as possible.
1. Choose your data carefully
Migrating an email archive can be a good opportunity to audit your data. However, if you’re currently suffering from poor eDiscovery and the new platform has much better functionality, it may be better to assess data after the migration.
2. Get employees on the right page
With a new archive, you’ll have new processes. Ensure employees are fully clued into how these work and have received any necessary training.
3. Ensure the migration doesn’t affect your legal and regulatory requirements
Highly regulated industries need to ensure that the archive complies with legal and regulatory requirements after the migration. Will emails retain their original format? If they need to be converted, will this affect their data? What happens to orphaned or corrupted files? Will the metadata be changed? You need to consider possibilities like this that may affect your compliance, or, choose a migration specialist who can ensure this for you.
4. Choose a trusted migration partner
As we’ve discussed, your email archive migration is extremely important and there are real consequences for getting it wrong. That’s why you need to ensure that you have full confidence in who you trust to do your migration. You may have the resources in-house, otherwise, choose a partner like Transvault. We use world-class technology with unbeatable expertise, experience and integrity to ensure your migration runs seamlessly