Forum Discussion
Why moving legacy email archive information to Office 365 can be so difficult and painful
Migration of legacy archives like Enterprise Vault are often left as the last part of the journey from on-premises servers to Office 365. A wide range of third-party migration tools are available, bu...
We had Enterprise Vault in our environment and we did purchase a 3rd party product. It did take weeks, and many phone calls with their tech support before we were finally able to get 99% of the e-mail out of Enterprise Vault and back into people's mailboxes.
It was not a fun process, but at the time it had to be done to get us migrated to Office365.
Great news that the legacy archive did not prevent you moving to the cloud - I would always recommend that you evaluate more than one solution and if have have time and resource to perform a POC with your preferred option.
If I remember a RFP was put out to help select something that would work. I wasn't on the project during that phase so I don't know what factors led to the choice of the product we did end up with.
It is definitely wise to conduct your own tests to validate the choice of archive migration technology before you commit to a project. Enterprise Vault has been around for a very long time now and is a well-known challenge, so the key points might not be in getting data out of the archive. Instead, points like speed of migration (critical if you have large amounts to move), the target destination inside Office 365 (mailboxes, shared mailboxes, inactive mailboxes...), how the migration is performed (as a service, on site, by you or the vendor), logging (have to be sure that everything moves), rehydration, splits (the kind of stuff discussed in my article), impact on user mailboxes and clients, and so on might be more important.
Some vendors advocate moving archives to Azure. I don't think this is a good idea because Azure has none of the compliance and eDiscovery features that are built into Office 365 (that you pay for in your license). It doesn't seem to make sense to me to move data off an obsolete platform (Enterprise Vault) to somewhere that doesn't provide the necessary functionality to preserve the usefulness of the migrated data. Microsoft is making a heavily investment in data governance for Office 365 to bring some of the workload-specific functionality to a point where it functions across the complete service and has add-ons like Advanced eDiscovery that can handle huge searches. So it seems like a good idea to leverage the current functionality and ongoing investment...
TR
