A combination of many factors has necessitated the requirement for archiving platforms in many larger corporates over the past 10 years, says By Chris Hathaway, Director at Soarsoft Africa.
These factors include legislative and corporate governance requirements, massive volumes of e-mail and other unstructured data, as well as user-generated data within files and folders.
A key driver for archiving solutions has typically been the ability to gain efficiencies in dealing with the continuous growth in the storage requirement and subsequent backup, continuity and recovery overheads. In addition, information governance, information retention and e-discovery elements have played an equally significant role, and in specific cases, have even formed the overriding requirement for the archive platforms to date.
Ten to 15 years on from the first 'commoditised' archive technologies and vendors, we have had a significant change in the unstructured data archive landscape. This has largely been driven by the requirement to archive the multitude of new and widely used platforms beyond just traditional e-mail, like instant and social messaging, Reuters, and collaboration platforms like Lync and SharePoint. The introduction of cloud-based messaging and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Office 365 (as well as Hosted Exchange and SharePoint), Skydrive, Dropbox, Box.net and many more appearing on a regular basis, has significantly changed the location and access to the source data needing to be archived.
The resulting hybrid combinations of on-site and cloud-based corporate information platforms are becoming increasingly common. In addition, a lack of scalability within an archiving solution and the inability to cope with the volume of data over the long-term results in an archive that is difficult to manage, necessitating a migration to a new platform.
This shift in the requirements and flexibility required by modern archive platforms has resulted in many large, established vendors of these archive technologies needing to completely rewrite their product code and tool sets, at the risk of losing out to more flexible and even cloud-based archive platforms and services. This, in combination with the continuous pressure on IT departments to reduce costs and leverage the 'cloud' for storage and e-mail within corporate environments, has seen the requirement to implement, migrate or move to a modern archive platform that deals with cloud and on-site based information. Archiving solutions may also have become obsolete or end of life, lacking the functionality to support Hosted Exchange or cloud solutions such as Microsoft 365. In some cases, customers may want to consume a cloud-based solution like Microsoft's Office 365, but still need to archive data in South Africa due to data sovereignty requirements. Large migrations to newer versions, acquisitions and mergers are also often a trigger for archive migrations.
Each archive solution is engineered differently to others and therefore requires skills and knowledge specific to the particular software solution. Unsuccessful archive migrations can have significant consequences to a business, and it therefore pays to get migrations right the first time. Users are constantly accessing the archived data, there are huge volumes of data collected in these platforms, and source platforms such as e-mail servers are highly reliant on them to offload data for efficiency. As a result of these factors, archive migrations at first seem nearly impossible and overly complex to action.
For these and other reasons, the need to conduct archive-to-archive migrations is on the increase, and as the requirement has grown, so too have the specialist services and toolsets required to complete them. However, for the majority of organisations, it is a significant challenge to have resources that have the required skills to perform a successful and timely migration between archives. In order to achieve the migration, resources need to have an in-depth understanding of the existing archiving solution as well as the solution that the content will be migrated to. Having a partner that specialises in these migrations can assist to reduce risk, ensure compliance and simplify the process of moving content from archive product A to archive product B.
The complexity of migrations is exacerbated by the huge volumes of data that exist within archiving solutions, typically generated over a number of years. The platforms themselves may also not have been adequately maintained and may not be performing well, which makes the migration more difficult to achieve.
When companies do attempt to conduct their own archive-to-archive migrations, the process typically needs to be completed manually, which can end up taking years to complete. During this time, it is all too easy to lose track of what data has been migrated and what has not, and there is no way of checking this with a manual migration. Using native migration tools can also prove difficult, as failure to migrate data is not reported on. During an archive-to-archive migration, it is essential to ensure the chain of custody is not compromised - in other words, that during the process of the migration the integrity of the data was not compromised at all, which is practically impossible without some form of reporting.
A successful migration should be as seamless as possible for users, and should take place in the back-end until such time as cutover occurs. Users should also have as few disruptions as possible and should be able to access all legacy information throughout the process. Compliance with e-discovery requirements, such as chain of custody, should be met before, during and after the migration and the migration should be fast and direct across multiple platforms. These many challenges serve to highlight the requirement to have access to a partner with expertise, skill and experience in a number of archiving platforms, and to make use of specialised tools that have been designed to simplify these archive migrations.
The reality is that the skills pool around archiving migrations is very limited, not simply in South Africa but across the globe. The required skills across the many different platforms, technologies and vendor solutions are not common, as most service providers focus on single-vendor solutions. Ensuring a successful archive-to-archive migration across platforms requires the services of an experienced multi-vendor service provider with knowledge and understanding of multiple archive vendor solutions. Service providers should also specialise in core systems such as those provided by Microsoft, IBM, Zimbra and others, and have access to a variety of tools to assist with the migration.
From both a risk and time perspective, it pays hugely to partner with a service provider that has experience with cross-platform messaging and archiving migrations, ensuring that migrations are completed quickly, effectively and with full compliance and audit trails in place.
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