Metalogix Archive Manager is an older archiving system owned by Quest. It is one of the major established solutions on the market, with a spread of different products and services related to data retention and management. At the same time, it is a rapidly aging set of technologies with a widening gap between what they offer and what the current market demands. Let’s explore why you should migrate from Metalogix Archive Manager, and how best to do so:
Among other things, Quest’s Metalogix suite offers a variety of products including Metalogix Content Matrix (SharePoint and Office 365 migration), Metalogix StoragePoint offering remote blob storage (RBS), Archive Manager for Exchange, and more – all as separate products.
Metalogix has historically been one of the major players on the market. And as touched on in the paragraph above, they offer their products and services in a variety of individual packages. At the same time, this industry standard has not evolved with the times; there are certain aspects of archiving generally which have been improved upon in the intervening time and the environment – legal and technological – requires a wholly new set of parameters than what used to be the norm. Older systems can no longer meet these requirements reliably.
What has changed in archiving?
Besides continued improvements on storage efficiency and the exploration of productivity-boosting archive features, the main change over time in the archiving sphere continues to be government regulation and mandates. Legal hold requirements, eDiscovery, mandatory retention periods, the Right to be Forgotten and more intertwine to create a complex and constantly evolving legal landscape.
Archive systems now have to enable their users to quickly and efficiently ensure compliance with local or transnational legal regulations – whether this means automatic retention of documents, automatic deletion, GDPR-compliant data storage, or more.
Older archives and backups lack the features to enable easy compliance – in some cases, lacking the capacity to ensure compliance at all. In these cases, companies continuing to operate these systems find themselves at increased risk; even in the best cases, they’re placing an increased burden on their admin teams, increasing the costs and time required to maintain standards.
Migrate with contentGATE
As should be obvious, keeping your archives and backups up to date is critical. This, however, presents difficulty for companies that currently use an out of date or more limited archive. There is a degree of sunk-cost fallacy that tends to keep these older systems in place.
For organizations looking to make a change and ensure they have taken the best route possible, TECH-ARROW can offer our contentGATE migrator. With over twenty years of experience, over 700 enterprise clients and over a billion migrated files, we offer our expertise to ensure your migration comes off without a hitch. From the first proof of concept until the final verification, our team is with you every step of the way!
What options do I have for my migration?
Virtual migration – migrating in name only
Of the four most common scenarios for Metalogix Archive Manager migration, the first and most basic is the so-called virtual migration option.
As suggested by the name, this does not encompass a full migration of one’s archived data. Instead, the MAM ecosystem remains active, with their existing database and data storage remaining in place. Our TECH-ARROW-designed contentACCESS solution is then integrated into their ecosystem via a reliable connector and gains access to your MAM data. No further data is cached into Metalogix Archive, instead being fed into contentACCESS.
This is in some ways the simplest solution; it also doesn’t incur any migration costs as there is no physical migration of data occurring, but the client is free to decide for a physical migration of his stored data and database at a later point. At the same time, it comes with several complicating factors – the largest one being that the MAM solution has to remain in place and active, so there is the possibility of remaining future support costs fees from Metalogix’s side.
Partial migration – cost-saving your virtual migration
That potential continuation of fees is also the reason why our clients more often choose the second scenario. It is in many ways the logical next step from the former one, and includes the disconnection of MAM but maintenance of existing database and storage. Here again, contentACCESS is connected to the existing storage and database, granting access to all of the archived data without needing to go through the middleman of Quest’s software.
This saves costs as you are no longer running Quest’s solution, and unlike virtual migration, it gives the capability to both read and write data. However, some of the features of TECH-ARROW’s solution – including our world-class full-text search – does not work for your old MAM archive, since the database and storage remain as they were with Quest’s indexing in place. And as before, no migration costs apply since data has still not been migrated physically.
Physical migration – the premium option
The third and most favorite migration that our clients decide for is a physical migration from MAM directly into our own archive solution. This is accomplished using TECH-ARROW’s contentGATE migration tool.
In performing a physical migration, contentGATE copies the existing data from storage and the databased metadata into contentACCESS, which then indexes them and integrates them fully into our contentACCESS archive. As a consequence, this grants you full access to the whole spectrum of features we can offer, including the aforementioned search system. The migration can be done both as an on-premise solution with contentACCESS installed directly on your servers, or offered as a service using the Cloud per client preference.
In either case, for such a migration from MAM to our solution we offer you a 50% off discount on any migrated inboxes or mail storage.
Migration to Exchange – an archive removal
We should note that there is a fourth possible scenario – migration for companies who want to entirely abandon their existing MAM system but do not want to implement any archiving solutions at all. In this case, we offer a migration wherein we rehydrate your archived emails back into Exchange. In this case, it is required that you have a subscription to Office 365.
It should be made clear that this solution is fundamentally the same as removing archiving solutions entirely and reintroduces all of the issues mitigated by having an archive (link to our relevant blog on issues here).
Do the possibilities we offer interest you? If you’re ready to explore taking the next step and get rid of your old MAM solution, contact us and request a consultation and a free quote for your migration today!
Archive your data with contentACCESS
