Email Archive Migration Preplanning Checklist

An email archive migration is a complex project that requires careful planning. Regardless of the reason for your need to migrate archived data (more on that below), you must consider issues such as chain of custody, data discovery requirements, data conversion time, and—of course—total migration project cost.

How you address each of those issues depends on factors unique to your environment: your source archive system, your target archive system, your volume of archived data, whether you opt for a manual services-based archive migration or an automated software-driven migration, and much more.

We’ve prepared an email archive migration project checklist to help you plan your archive migration and thereby avoid unforeseen pitfalls. Download a copy here if any of these scenarios sound familiar:


-Business Change. Is your company going through a merger, acquisition or divestiture, or do staff or entire departments often re-locate between locations? Archived records will almost certainly need to be amalgamated, extracted or moved to reflect organizational change.
-Archive Architecture Upgrade. Archive vendors often have to re-architect their product to improve performance and scalability. This may mean you need to migrate data stored in a legacy archive format to take full advantage of a new archive architecture.
-Improve scalability. Are retrievals or archive runs taking too long? Are you facing major infrastructure upgrades to accommodate growth? If your original archive is not ‘up to the job’ of servicing your needs, a move to better/newer technology will save money and improve service levels.
-Reduce Cost of Ownership. Is your IT team spending too much time and expense ‘nursing’ your existing archive: restarting stopped processes, responding to help desk calls, etc? To quote a customer that migrated from a legacy archive platform: “with [the previous solution] we went from being full time Exchange administrators to full time archive administrators”.
-E-Discovery Capability. Is your archive platform failing to provide adequate discovery and litigation support services? Secure, audited and rapid transitioning of your archived data to an alternative platform or specialist service with the additional discovery capabilities your organization needs could save your company millions.
-Protection Against Obsolescence. Has your incumbent archive supplier fallen by the wayside? Will your original storage choice last to meet evolving retention needs? Although you chose the best technoloy at the time, if were an early adopter these are likely scenarios and you need to ensure your data does not get locked in.
-Change in IT Model. Does your organization want to outsource its IT services or use cloud computing? If so, your users will want to maintain access to legacy data via the new service.
-Better Support. Has the quality of service offered by your original vendor diminished? An unsupported version or unresponsive supplier could threaten the ongoing accessibility of your data.

For more information, visit our web site at:

http://www.flexnet.com/whitepaperDL/email_archive_migration_preplanning_checklist.htm