With the news that Quest’s Quest Archive Manager will near EOL in 2027, it’s time to reintroduce the topic of data migration. At the core, it’s the question of saving your critical data despite systems your organization relied on being depreciated. Planning your migration is key to ensuring a successful outcome.
Why migrate at all?
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.
What options do I have for my migration?
- Virtual migration – data remains in place, and a connection is made to the legacy system
- Partial migration – discontinuation of the old system but maintenance of the database and storage
- Physical migration – complete movement of data from one system to another
- Discontinuation of the archive – email archives can be rehydrated back into exchange
Cloud or On-Premises?
Once you’ve decided on a physical or partial migration, part of planning your migration process includes deciding if you want to migrate your data to the Cloud or to an On-Premises environment.
The Cloud has been the more common recent choice because the possibility of offloading operating costs of hardware onto a third-party is extremely tempting, no matter if that hardware is simple storage space or computing power and no matter if the Cloud is a public or private environment.
At the same time, on-premises archives hold some measure of attraction due to the in-house nature, which can seem more secure and more completely under your control. Additionally, some archiving systems can function as a hybrid, with the database on the Cloud but the index and other elements kept local. In the end, the decision hinges on which meets your company needs the best.
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!
Your Data in Your hands – With TECH-ARROW
by Matúš Koronthály
Image generated by Canva
