Venyu Blog

To amplify our recent podcast on the advantages of email archiving with LiveOffice, with whom Venyu has partnered to provide its industry-leading archiving platform to our clients, Nick Mehta, LiveOffice CEO, was recently interviewed by the online publication, Processor Magazine on the importance of developing a plan prior to migrating email to the cloud. In this article, Mehta makes the observation that most IT departments spend at least half their budget on salaries and up to 70% of IT staff time is spent maintaining systems such as email.

To determine which path is right of you Mehta outlines several approaches including:

• Greenfield migration. Allows an enterprise to provision users and move everyone at once, however while it’s easy to move a large group and because there’s no legacy mailbox data, employees might be affected by the loss of old messages.
• End-user migration. Provisions users and provides them with migration tools so they can bring over their legacy mail on their own. Under this strategy employees would have to be trained on using the tools or guided through the process.
• Minimal migration. A less invasive approach, this path migrates only core content such as calendars and contact lists, which may work as long as employees don’t mind missing data from older mailboxes.
• Classic migration. Migrates groups of users, preserves most email content and ideal for supporting large-scale migrations because any problems can be handled on a smaller scale rather than for the entire enterprise email system at once.

A second email “tactician” interviewed for the article, Steve Crawford, suggests that by its nature, the portability of email is well-suited for migration off-premises. “Migrating email from an on-premises solution to a cloud-based counterpart offers similar if not better functionality and performance, enabling IT organizations to free up resources to focus on mission-critical applications and infrastructure that absolutely needs to be managed internally.”

Crawford also recommends taking a deeper look at how operations and usability will be affected as cloud-based solutions, in general, require fewer customization capabilities than their on-premises equivalents.

Mehta, in turn, also recommends an archiving solution with a cloud provider prior to the email migration in order to free up internal resources for planning and executing the upgrade. In Venyu’s case that experience translates to several “value-adds” including: 

• Multiple data protection and compliance services: fewer vendors to manage
• More than three years of experience with Tier 1 LiveOffice support
• Discounting opportunities with large, multi-service deals

While migrating your email services to the cloud may (or may not) be immediately in the cards for your organization, as Crawford observes and it’s a sentiment I fully echo, “The cloud is helping define a vision for how enterprise IT can better meet the needs of their organizations.”

And, for my money at least, that’s an exceptional outcome for a technology that’s only begun to find its enterprise footing.