Migrate Files and Emails to New Cloud Platform: Secure Migration Guide

Migrating files and emails to a new cloud platform may seem like a simple task. However, businesses must often transfer years’ worth of mailboxes, SharePoint, and OneDrive data without disrupting any of their current operations. In addition to simply choosing to migrate files and emails to new cloud platform, organizations also need to preserve permissions, folder hierarchy, attachments, and more.

Copy-paste may not be the answer for a huge data migration. Read more to learn why your organization will want to migrate files and emails to your new cloud platform, understand what a “manual” migration really means, and how a specific migration tool can increase its security, speed, and reliability.

Why Businesses Move to a New Cloud Platform

When a Company Considers Migration, Usually There Are Compelling Reasons these may include mergers requiring the consolidation of two disparate email systems, budgets being strained by annual software licensing renewals, or even just the simple need for a more scalable cloud storage tier. Whatever the reason, there is typically one goal that has to be met: the transfer of all the mailboxes, files, and data between users without loss of productivity.

That’s a noble objective, but it has a tendency to become much more complex than expected when hundreds or even thousands of users are involved.

The Manual Approach to Cloud Migration

Most email platforms, including Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo Mail, offer their own manual exporting options such as Google Takeout, Outlook’s PST export, or using IMAP to transfer messages. Native mail app solutions are usually sufficient for a few personal accounts and several exportable files.

The process of exporting email manually is generally as follows:

• Exporting mailbox data to a file on a computer in the desired format (PST, MBOX, EML, or another available option).
• Downloading files and folders directly from the cloud.
• Uploading the downloaded files to the target email platform.
• Rebuilding the folder structure and sharing settings.

The migration’s duration depends on the information’s size and one’s knowledge about the process. It may take several hours or days to transfer a personal mailbox. In contrast, an enterprise using tens of thousands of files will spend a few weeks migrating and have no confidence that everything has been moved correctly.

Where Manual Migration Falls Short

Native export and import tools were not designed for large-scale migrations involving multiple platforms. Several limitations tend to surface:

• Folder hierarchy and label structure: Folder structures and labels are not always preserved, so users may need to re-sort emails and files.
• Duplicate emails or files: Duplicates can appear if a migration is cancelled or performed more than once.
• Permissions and sharing: Permissions and sharing generally have to be reinstated on the target place.
• Limited Filtering: It might not be easy to review and delete irrelevant data ahead of time during the migration.
• Limited migration visibility: IT departments cannot always see exactly what data was migrated and what issues may have occurred.

None of this makes manual migration impossible. It just means the effort scales poorly past a handful of mailboxes, which is exactly where purpose-built migration tools earn their place.

DRS Softech Tools to Migrate Files and Emails to New Cloud Platform

DRS Softech has developed a complete solution set that addresses cloud-to-cloud file and email migrations for specific source-to-destination combinations, rather than offering one all-in-one tool. Five of DRS Softech’s migration tools are tailored to address the five most common migration scenarios that IT managers face:

1. G Suite to Office 365 Migration Tool: A great utility that helps you migrate Google Workspace email accounts, calendars, data, and files to Microsoft 365. The tool is suitable for both selective and bulk transfers. Migrates Google Workspace mailboxes only.
2. IMAP to Office 365 Migration Tool: Emigrates Emails, Attachments, Folder Structures, and email properties from an IMAP-activated email ID to a M365 account. It helps with individual and bulk Mailbox migration, maintaining crucial email info and properties. 
3. Exchange to Office 365 Migration Tool: Smoothly migrate your Mailboxes from online / on premise hosted Exchange to Office 365. No emails, contacts, or folder structure gets lost during the migration. Provides bulk migration, mailbox mapping, OAuth authentication, and advanced filters.
4. Yahoo to Office 365 Migration Tool: Helpful for transferring Yahoo mail to M365 where emails and folders are extracted precisely without any data loss. It migrates a single folder or multiple folders in bulk in an easy and reliable way.
5. MBOX to Office 365 Migration Tool: Used to transfer individual or multiple MBOX files to M365 with the ease of bulk migration, date filtering, and duplicate removal, which successfully transfers files from 20+ email clients while keeping data intact.

Based on source environments, organizations can also migrate files to new cloud platform by utilizing an appropriate solution.

Advantages of using a dedicated migration tool

A dedicated migration tool helps IT teams carry out migrations more smoothly and reliably than they can using manual file export and import.

• Folder Structure: Folder hierarchies are transferred to the destination platform properly without being manually created by the user.
• Bulk Migration: Users can migrate emails to new cloud platform for multiple accounts at once instead of doing it for each mailbox separately.
• Migration Filters: Filter messages with such options as Duplicate Email Detection, Date Range Filter, Extension Filter, Content Type Filter, File Size Filter, and others.
• Duplicate Detection: Avoid migrating duplicate emails using filters based on Subject, Body, and CC.

Conclusion

The migration process between clouds is not something that can be automated right away, so it may require weeks of exports and rebuilding the folder hierarchy. At the same time, understanding the limitations of native tools makes it clear why the decision to migrate files and emails to new cloud platform with a dedicated utility is not only convenient but necessary. The tools developed by DRS Softech address this particular challenge, offering extensive support for migration from one platform to another without requiring the user to design an enterprise-grade solution.

Frequently Asked Questions