You need to move an email archive. Your technology team needs to keep the business running, deliver existing projects and possibly integrate another acquisition. Recruiting them into a temporary migration department deserves a little scrutiny.
A useful question is who’ll do the work once the migration tool has been chosen. With eMXport, the delivery model is fully managed. That changes the workload you’re asking your own team to take on.
Look beyond the software
When you assess a migration approach, ask for a clear account of the customer’s responsibilities. Who sets things up? Who watches the jobs? Who investigates when something needs attention?
eMXport’s published platform scope covers deployment, job operation, monitoring and exception handling. There’s no eMXport appliance for your team to install or migration server for them to patch. Support is included in the managed engagement.
The practical benefit is a defined owner for those tasks. Your infrastructure team doesn’t need to add “operate the migration platform” to an already ambitious to-do list.
Keep your team involved where it counts
Fully managed delivery still needs your organisation’s input. You provide access, decisions and knowledge of the estate.
We’d recommend making that contribution visible in the project plan. Name the people who understand the archive, can approve access and can decide what happens when the scope needs clarification.
Then agree how progress will be reviewed. You want enough information to make decisions without turning every update into a second job.
For an M&A programme, this distinction is particularly useful. Your engineers can remain involved in the archive’s place within the integration without also running its migration machinery.
What does that look like at enterprise scale?
Savage Co’s published case study describes a Proofpoint-to-Mimecast migration using eMXport: 176 million emails and 40TB of uncompressed data. TPP managed the technical work, with Savage’s teams attending regular progress meetings. Savage had no migration software to install or infrastructure to maintain.
The lesson for a prospective buyer is about responsibility as well as size. Ask a supplier to show how its delivery approach affects the work your people will actually do.
A diagram of the technology is useful. A clear division of responsibilities is useful on Monday morning.
Judge the proposal against your team’s capacity
Our suggestion is to review a migration proposal alongside the work already committed to your internal team. Who can realistically supply access, make decisions and review the outcome?
Be specific about those contributions. “The IT team will help” isn’t a staffing plan, however reassuring it looks in a meeting.
Managed delivery can make sense when you want specialist migration work owned by a delivery team and your own people focused on decisions about the business. That’s a benefit worth assessing in its own right.
If your archive needs to move and your engineers’ diaries are already full, talk to us about the managed approach. We’ll explain what we handle and what we’ll need from you.