In part one of this article we identified four things that you should be wary of when planning any data migration:

• Quality of the data transfer
• Speed of the process
• Consulting costs
• Disruption

In this second and final part we look at how CloudFiler’s data migration tools address these issues making the process fast and simple.

Making the move to CloudFiler, is it really that easy?

We knew that a large portion of our customers would be users of older systems with legacy data in a range of formats, so in tandem with the development of CloudFiler, we built two data migration tools designed to streamline data import from:

• Popular email management systems
• PST files
• Emails in file-system folders
• Outlook inboxes
• Public Folders
• Shared inboxes

Whilst this makes data import uneventful, you will typically be cautious and want to try small portions of your data first, so the tools allow you to either import everything or just selected locations.

You may need to try the same process several times to verify that things are working as expected, so the Bulk Uploader allows you to repeat the same exercise on the same locations and will automatically skip any messages that have already been uploaded. This not only makes the process easier, it also reduces the time required and the stress, because you can incrementally upload the data rather than having to do a final upload of everything from scratch over a long weekend.

Realising that customers could have many millions of emails to upload we made the tool multi-threaded so that it can upload multiple emails at a time; for example in tests with customer emails of varying sizes it achieved 120,000 email per hour.

Lastly the tool, shows statistics including the number processed per hour and the time remaining to completion. It also writes various log files so that you have a clear view of the process.

As part of our half-day set-up service, we teach you how to use the tools so that you can do it yourself thus avoiding consulting costs.

“Ours is a small practice and we don’t have dedicated IT support in-house, so there was a concern that the deployment and data migration would require expert help and additional cost, but it was both simple and easy and the Dinamich team called from time to time just to make sure that all was fine, which was refreshing and welcomed.”  Sam,  Casswell Bank Architects

Summary

The decision to move to a new system is never taken lightly, but it can be easy to overlook some of the costs, or conversely elect not to proceed because the anticipated cost of change is too great.

CloudFiler customers have the comfort of knowing that the data migration process is simple, fast, reliable and something they can do themselves.