Cloud Migration – It’s Not Drag and Drop

Personally adopting the Cloud is easy. Select everything in My Documents and drag it all over to DropBox, Box, OneDrive, or GDrive. Magic. Easy. Done.

But what’s a piece of cake to you is a horror show for companies with tons of users and terabytes or petabytes of data. 

Those companies may try FTP or free tools. That is a big mistake. Here’s five reasons why:

Stuff Gets Lost

FTP and free tools have low limits on how much content they can move. A large migration is going to be broken up into dozens of small jobs, and these tools don’t tell you what failed to transfer. 

Cloud FastPath immediately reports what hasn’t migrated--allowing you to keep going while rescheduling those items, or trying again.

Permissions and Sharing Get Screwed Up

Cloud FastPath automates permissions mapping so that organizations don’t need to run the risk of deploying their new cloud environment, only to find that carefully built and maintained permission structures have been absolutely shredded during migration. FTP and free tools don’t do this.

Metadata Goes Poof

Metadata can be extremely simple, like saying who created a document or who accessed it last and when. It could be a tag noting that a document relates to a certain topic or project. Other times, it can convey complex facets such as how long a document is meant to be retained for, retrieval and dissemination protocols, or ownership rights. In these scenarios metadata serves the essential purpose of categorizing and describing content, much of which is extremely valuable. You don’t want to lose this.

Is a free tool or FTP really worth having to re-tag thousands of pieces of content? Is it worth digging through years of files and folders to recreate the structure that you spent so long cultivating? 

It is Slooowww

FTP and free tools take far longer to migrate data, and they don’t provide any of the security or organization that Cloud FastPath does. This means that not only are you waiting months upon months to finally complete that migration project, but you also have no guarantee when different pieces of content will get where, and when users will have access to their files again. 

Ya Get One Shot

Using FTP or free tools for cloud migration is like playing freeze tag. You have to tell everyone to stop what they are doing while you do a painfully slow migration that will blow up your metadata and mess up all your permissions. So much better to have analytics to sort important from less important data; know who your power users are, and work with them; do a test run to make sure everything will migrate as you planned; and be able to do a synchronized migration so folks can use either their original source or your destination and have access to the same docs. They won’t even know it’s going on. And you’ll never have to say “freeze.”

Data migrations affect all of your employees. You probably don’t know all of your company’s employees’ names. Messing up a migration is not how you want them to learn yours.

Seamless migration is in reach with the right tools. It’s not as easy as drag and drop. But you can make it look like it is.