How to Migrate from Barracuda to Office 365/Exchange Online?

Businesses are increasingly moving away from on-premises email systems and opting for cloud services. However, a large fraction of this userbase continues to use on-premises archiving systems to store business-critical information in mailboxes that could contain contact details, legal records, intellectual property, and financial accounts. While such data is rarely accessed, it accumulates rapidly over time, and safeguarding it is necessary for compliance. Eventually, archiving systems either run out of storage space or are too expensive to expand. In this article, let us examine how to migrate from Barracuda to Office 365/ Microsoft 365.

Why Migrate from Barracuda to Office 365?

Barracuda is a leading archiving solution provider that works with Exchange Online and other services. However, procuring it as a hardware appliance or as a virtual solution for integrating it with Office 365/ Microsoft 365 entails additional expenses. Instead, using the legal hold (Litigation Hold and In-Place Hold) options could be a better alternative. Here are some of the advantages.

• It would result in significant savings.
• Archive mailboxes are much more scalable as Office 365/ Microsoft 365 plans include the auto-expanding archiving feature for unlimited expansion.
• Content will not be duplicated making the archiving process more efficient.
• Messages can be stored in their original, unedited form.
• Admins can manage all the compliance-related settings from a single interface and will not have to toggle between different systems.
• Microsoft 365/ Office 365 plans include powerful eDiscovery features that simplify searches significantly.
• Mails are archived based on individual accounts rather than a unified folder storing all PST files together.

How to Migrate from Barracuda Solutions to Office 365/ Microsoft 365?

The steps for migrating to Office 365 or Exchange Online could vary with the current Barracuda solution that has been deployed. Let us look at the different migration techniques that can be used for Barracuda to Office 365 migration.

Barracuda ArchiveOne to Office 365/ Microsoft 365 Migration

Barracuda stopped offering ArchiveOne products from May 2018. Although the maintenance and support contracts were valid until May 2019, many organizations continue to use ArchiveOne without updates as the solution came with perpetual licenses. Barracuda offers a native solution to migrate to Office 365/ Microsoft 365 for such customers. Here are the brief steps involved in such a migration.

• Configure ArchiveOne to Enable Exchange Online from the License tab on the Admin console.
• Create an ArchiveOne Admin user if one does not exist already.
• Migrate the existing ArchiveOne service account mailbox to Microsoft 365/ Office 365.
• Use PowerShell to enable ArchiveOne access to Exchange Online.

This has to be performed for each new mailbox that has been created in Office 365 or Microsoft 365.

Migrating Emails from Barracuda Message Archiver to Office 365

If your emails are stored in Barracuda Message Archiver, there is no out-of-the-box solution provided by Barracuda for Office 365/ Microsoft 365 migration. You will have to use zip files/ PST files that can be imported into Office 365 if the volume of data is too high for re-hydrating and exporting.

• Create a backup for all the files in the Server Message Block (SMB) share of Barracuda Message Archiver on a drive.
• Ensure that you have another drive with sufficient space where you can create your working folder.
• Export the contents of Barracuda Message Archiver as Zip files.
• Extract the contents to the working folder and decompress them.
• Ensure that your files have a .eml extension.
• Import the contents into Office 365 mailboxes.

While the PST/ Zip file export method will work with most solutions including Barracuda products, it is complicated, error-prone and often requires complex scripting.

Tools for Barracuda to Office 365 Migration

Many third-party tools can perform Barracuda to Office 365/ Exchange Online migration. They could have the following advantages over the methods stated above.

• They may be able to support end-to-end data migration and simplify management.
• The Office 365 migration can be performed from the Barracuda archiving system without interim steps that could increase the cost, complexity, risk, and time for the migration.
• They could manage Office 365 throttling/network throttling better to optimize the migration speed.
• Admins can implement policies to select the data that has to be migrated from Barracuda to Microsoft solutions.
• Stub cleaning and archived email re-hydration could be automated.
• Many tools can even ensure that the chain-of-custody is intact after migration.

Apps4Rent Can Help with Barracuda to Office 365/ Exchange Online Migration

One of the most important steps in the Barracuda to Exchange Online/ Office 365 migration is the process of “unstubbing”. During this process, attachments are added back to the email body before sending it to the server after which the Office 365/ Microsoft 365 migration will be performed. This cannot be done if there is not sufficient space on the server. Also, there is a high probability of data loss if the operation is not executed perfectly. As a Tier 1 Microsoft CSP, Apps4Rent has performed thousands of migrations to Microsoft 365/ Office 365 from on-premises and cloud solutions that involve complex planning and execution. Contact our migration experts available 24/7 via phone, chat, and email for assistance.