How to Migrate Enterprise Vault to Office 365?

A little over a decade ago, businesses often had to rely on third-party archives like Veritas Enterprise Vault because of their email archiving capabilities. They had better compliance and eDiscovery features compared to regular mailboxes. As the complexity of the business environment evolved, there is an increasing need to archive other electronic data including instant messages, social media posts, and even internet searches of employees. Over time, Office 365 has evolved by leaps and bound. Its archiving solutions are as powerful as specialized archiving software. It isn’t surprising that businesses opt to migrate Enterprise Vault to Office 365.

Reasons to Migrate Enterprise Vault to Office 365?

Enterprise Vault has become a legacy archiving system. It lacks several capabilities of Office 365.

• Technological underpinnings

  Enterprise Vault was built with a modular structure that limits its capabilities and compromises on user experience. Compared to Office 365 provides a unified experience. Users can search for a variety of data ranging from emails, instant personal messages, and even social media communication easily.

• Access limitations

  Unlike Office 365 mailboxes which allow all users to access their archived data, it is relatively more difficult for all users to access their data with Enterprise Vault. In most organizations, that capability is reserved with the IT team who will have their task cut-out to look for specific data if the need arises.

• On-premises dependence

  As with most other legacy systems, Enterprise Vault implemented by several businesses is an on-premises system. It cannot be accessed from the internet. Users must access it behind the corporate firewall.

• Lacks real-time coverage

  Unlike Office 365, archiving can be a laborious process with Enterprise Vault. It is also much more prone to errors. It is not rare to find data that has not been achieved completely leaving businesses exposed to legal troubles.

Consequently, Office 365 migration is becoming increasingly common as more businesses are decommissioning their expensive-third party legacy achieving systems.

Techniques to move archive data and migrate emails to Office 365

There are different types of data that exist in legacy archives. The process of Enterprise Vault migration to Office 365 must involve the consideration of the types of data and techniques involved in the migration process.

Types of data in third-party archives

There are broadly two types of information that are stored in third-party archives.

• Stubs

  Stubs are shortened or compressed items. These are obtained by removing the attachments and changing the message bodies to make them smaller. Thus, the original messages in the mailbox are replaced with shortcuts that point to the archive folder. These are then restored by a process called rehydration with special tools.

• Journal reports

  These are copies that can be used in legal-defense that have details like sender email ID, email subject, message-ID, and receiver’s email address among other details from original messages. The original message is added as an attachment to the report.

Types of migration techniques

There are again two widely used techniques for Enterprise Vault migration to Office 365.

• Journal splitting

  This method involves dividing the archive mail data that are segregated and moved to a set a target Office 365 mailboxes. In most cases, these are shared mailboxes to which Office 365 licenses similar to the personal mailboxes have been assigned.

• Journal explosion

  This method involves reconstituting individual reports as items and that is then recreated in the respective user mailboxes that received the original message.

How to Decide on the Migration Technique?

Now that you know the kind of archiving data that is stored on systems like Enterprise Vault and are familiar with the most commonly used techniques of Enterprise vault migration, identify your needs based on the quantity and type of data to be migrated to Office 365. That should help you decide the tools you would need for the migration process if needed. If the number of archives is not too many, the most straightforward method would be to convert the archive messages to PST files and import them into Office 365 mailboxes. But that method can certainly not be used with larger enterprises.

Assistance to migrate Enterprise Vault to Office 365

Migrating a legacy archiving system to Office 365 is much more complicated than regular mailboxes. Things become trickier when legacy journal data is involved because Microsoft has reservations about how Exchange Online can be used for storing archive data. As a Microsoft partner, Apps4Rent engineers will help your business plan the best migration path with 24/7 support via phone, chat, and email. Contact our support team today.
 
Also Read: Are You Ready for Email Migration?