Frequently Asked Questions Akaibu Evolve for Microsoft Exchange & Office 365

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1 Table of contents: Q1. What is Akaibu Evolve for Microsoft Exchange & Office 365?... 2 Q2. What archives are supported?... 2 Q3. Will I need to buy services?... 3 Q4. Why not just import our legacy archive to Exchange via PST files?... 3 Q5. I would like to upload users PST files into Exchange/Office 365. How does Evolve help?... 4 Q6. Can Akaibu Evolve help manage what we upload into Exchange?... 4 Q7. How quickly can Akaibu Evolve migrate archived items?... 4 Q8. How can I find out if Evolve has migrated all of the data?... 5 Q9. What happens if an item fails to migrate?... 5 Q10. How does Evolve aid compliance when migrating?... 5 Q11. What do you mean by chain of custody and why is it important?... 6 Q12. Why do Exchange Journal Archives require special care?... 6 Q13. I want to move to a hosted Exchange service - can Evolve help?... 6 Q14. We are involved in a demerger and need to split up our archive. How does this work?... 7 Q15. How can we remove legacy archive shortcuts or stubs from users mailboxes?... 7 Q16. How is Akaibu Evolve licensed?... 7 Q17. Do I need to provide systems to run Akaibu Evolve on?... 7 Q18. Can new connectors be commissioned for development?... 7 Q19. How can I find out more?... 7 Tuesday, Page 1 October 7, 2014 Copyright Akaibu, Inc PAGE 1

2 Q1. What is Akaibu Evolve for Microsoft Exchange & Office 365? Akaibu Evolve for Microsoft Exchange & Office 365 is a high-performance application that migrates from myriad legacy third-party archive platforms into Microsoft Exchange on-premises, Office 365 (Exchange Online Archives), or a hybrid environment. Fully certified to run on the Windows platform and one of the first migration applications to support the powerful Exchange Web Services (EWS) API, Akaibu Evolve moves your records in one step to maintain chain-of-custody. Your move is also fully audited to ensure peace of mind. As you move you can use Akaibu Evolve to perform selective migrations based on multiple criteria enabling you to take only the data you need and minimize the time and cost of your migration. Akaibu Evolve also includes advanced item selection capabilities, to ensure as seamless as possible experience for end users is provided. For example, you can migrate only the items for which a shortcut still exists in the user s mailbox. Example migration scenarios include: Moving from an unsatisfactory or legacy archive solution into Exchange Volume uploads of PST files into Exchange Standardization onto a common archive (e.g. where merging organizations have incompatible systems) A switch to an cloud-based strategy based on Exchange (i.e. Office 365, including Wave 15) Migration from IBM Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange (using an Archive First approach) During the migration process, all actions are fully audited to ensure chain-of-custody. Q2. What archives are supported? Akaibu Evolve supports migration into Microsoft Exchange primary mailboxes and personal archives, onpremise and online (via EWS) from a very wide range of proprietary archive including: GFI Mail Archiver EAS for Exchange (ZANTAZ) NearPoint (Mimosa) EMC Xtender for Exchange EMC SourceOne for Exchange EML files Metalogix Archive Manager: Exchange Edition Microsoft Exchange On Premise (MAPI) Barracuda Message Archiver Microsoft Exchange Online*/Office 365 (EWS) Microsoft Exchange Personal Archives (EWS) MSG files PST files Quest Archive Manager Symantec Enterprise Vault for Exchange & EV.Cloud Tuesday, Page 2 October 7, 2014 Copyright Akaibu, Inc PAGE 2

3 You can also use Akaibu Evolve to: Export data out of Microsoft Exchange primary mailboxes and personal archives, on-premise and online. Import and export data from/to industry standard file formats including PST, EML and MSG files Accelerate migrations from/to hosted systems, including Office 365, Mimecast & Enterprise Vault.cloud Perform migration and conversion from Lotus Notes archives to Microsoft Exchange (see also Q14) More platforms are being added all the time. Please visit Akaibu to ask whether your particular archive platform is supported. Q3. Will I need to buy services? No. Evolve automates most of the data migration process, you will need minimal service and support to plan the migration, install and configure Evolve, and oversee a successful completion. We are so confident in our product that we include service and support free as part of your licensing purchase. Many of our partners are also able to provide and implement your Exchange /Office 365 environment. To contact Akaibu or to find a reseller or partner, please see more information. Q4. Why not just import our legacy archive to Exchange via PST files? Many third-party archive platforms offer the ability to export archived mailboxes to PST files, conversely, Exchange/Office 365 offers tools to assist with PST file ingestion. It s tempting, therefore, to consider a manual approach that uses PST files as an interim format. There are many issues with this manual, PST-driven approach, which include: It s slow and intensive. Native archive extraction and import tools are typically single threaded and needs to be manually overseen (i.e. you could not leave several mailboxes running overnight). This significantly increases the migration time-frame and manpower costs involved. There s no error management. If an extract or import fails, the process stops with no indication of what the problem was and no ability to resume where the process left off or skip (and identify) just the items that fail. There s no logging or auditing. With PSTs there is no record of what data has been moved. All checking of PST actions needs to be done manually and this is subject to human error. PSTs risk the security and integrity of your data. The multi-step process involved in PST migrations mean that files need to be held in an interim location for a length of time, during which they are potentially open to tampering. Chain of custody is broken as a consequence, making a PST-driven migration unsuitable for organizations that have a compliance remit. Large PST files are prone to corruption. This creates problems when extracting large mailbox archives or Journal archives. You ll need lots of interim storage: You ll need to set aside a large amount of space to pre-stage your data as it is migrated. Given that PSTs are notoriously space-inefficient and that you will lose single instance storage, this may be up to 10 times the size of your legacy archive. No ingestion flexibility. With the PST approach you will typically need move all data in a mailbox there s rarely the ability to filter or be selective over what you extract or ingest. By comparison Akaibu Evolve offers automated, multi-threaded, high-speed extraction with full error- logging and chain-of-custody. It also offers advanced data selection and mailbox management capabilities. Tuesday, Page 3 October 7, 2014 Copyright Akaibu, Inc PAGE 3

4 Q5. I would like to upload users PST files into Exchange/Office 365. How does Evolve help? Evolve offers the most advanced and scalable PST ingestion capability available today. Its features include: Automated, high-speed upload - direct into either Exchange 2007 SP1 and the Personal Archive service introduced with Exchange 2010 Pre-upload analysis of PSTs The ability to filter what is uploaded, e.g.: o Upload s less than 3 months into the primary Exchange server o Upload s between 3 months and 2 years old into the Personal Archive service o Don t migrate s with [SPAM] in the subject or in Personal folders Full logging and auditing of all upload activity Throughput control parameters to limit loading on your live Exchange environment Q6. Can Akaibu Evolve help manage what we upload into Exchange? Yes. Prior to your migration Akaibu Evolve helps analyze your existing archive usage - e.g. how much storage is being used, how many archive stores there are, the average mailbox size, total number of items etc. Evolve then lets you be selective in what you migrate and to where. For example, you might want to migrate a department of users at a time to a specific Exchange server or re-group users according to storage consumption. Compliance regulations permitting, it s also possible to: Move just the last n years-worth of data, Move only the data that users still have shortcuts to Not move data according to criteria including To, From, Subject, Folder, Attachment, Date A migration is therefore a great opportunity to significantly reduce the quantity of you retain. Q7. How quickly can Akaibu Evolve migrate archived items? Migration speeds from an on-premises archive into Office 365 have been measured at a rate equivalent to 1.2TB a day. Note, however, that achieving best performance is dependent on many environmental factors such as: Available network bandwidth Speed of the storage subsystem on which the legacy archive sits as well as the destination storage The ingestion performance of the target archive system (typical speeds may range from 5-50 GB/hour) The scheduling of other project elements such as the commissioning of the target environment. As well as running multiple threads on a single server, multiple Akaibu Evolve servers can be configured to operate in parallel to ensure that the performance of the Evolve services is never a limiting bottleneck for the duration of the project. Akaibu Ltd., or certified partner, can establish a proof of concept (POC) to find likely throughput rates in your specific environment. Tuesday, Page 4 October 7, 2014 Copyright Akaibu, Inc PAGE 4

5 Q8. How can I find out if Evolve has migrated all of the data? Akaibu Evolve includes auditing functions that keep track of the migration of each individual item. If the migration of an individual item fails (e.g. owing to data corruption, system configuration or connectivity issues) tasks can be automatically re-run to target just these items, adding them into the new Exchange mailbox alongside items that were previously successfully migrated. Reporting is also available to highlight how much data has been moved for each user in the legacy archive. Q9. What happens if an item fails to migrate? Failures may simply be temporary failures owing to environmental issues such as poor network bandwidth or high loading on the legacy archive system, in which case Evolve will automatically re-process the relevant item(s) a specified number of times and/or at a different time of day. In the event of a permanent failure, a full log of the item(s) in question is produced, enabling further sitespecific investigation. Permanent failures tend to be low typically.001% of the overall quantity. They are also usually attributable to pre-existing problems in the source archive (i.e. not caused by the migration process). If your organization requires further investigative work to be carried out in the event of a corrupted item, a simple SQL query can be run on the Evolve database to find the root cause of the item failure. All failures are logged to provide full chain-of-custody. Q10. How does Evolve aid compliance when migrating? Manual migration methods that rely on problematic PST files (see response to Q5 & Q6) are subject to human error and have no tracking or auditing mechanism to prove that a migration was 100% successful. As described earlier in this document, Evolve eliminates opportunity for human error. It also includes complete auditing of the migration process. For example, detailed reports show 1:1 mappings of the ID of the item in the source archive and the ID of the new item as it now exists in Exchange, enabling you to demonstrate of a complete Chain of Custody for the data whilst undergoing migration. Importantly, Evolve is the only solution available that is able to preserve BCC d recipients and distribution list information from Journal mailbox archives. These messages may be part of legal proceedings or may be subject to regulatory requirements, so the loss of such vital information could be extremely costly and potentially damaging. Tuesday, Page 5 October 7, 2014 Copyright Akaibu, Inc PAGE 5

6 Q11. What do you mean by chain of custody and why is it important? Chain of custody refers to the reliable recording of processes and procedures that occur while evidence (physical or electronic) is being captured, held, transferred or disposed of. It is vital that the evidence in question has remained free from alteration and that secure handling has been provided at all stages. Akaibu Evolve s logging and reporting capability provides chain-of-custody evidence demonstrating that data has been successfully transferred into Exchange or Office 365. This is important since any later data investigation or discovery against migrated s will seek to validate that the data has been handled correctly and that nothing was missed out. Q12. Why do Exchange Journal Archives require special care? Firstly, Journal archives tend to be extremely large, making a manual extraction approach slow and subject to size-related problems that can be encountered when relying on PST files as an interim store. Evolve allows journal and large mailboxes to be split into a number of separately handled virtual mailboxes of a user-defined size. This allows multiple processing threads to be applied to the migration of a single mailbox, significantly speeding up the migration task. Secondly, most of the organizations that capture s into Exchange Journal mailboxes, for compliance reasons, have now standardized using the Envelope Journaling feature. This feature was developed by Microsoft as a way to preserve vital P1 header information which includes BCC'd recipients and the expanded members of any distribution lists. From a compliance perspective, P1 data must be preserved and available for access. The important thing to note is that different archive platforms store the additional P1 envelope information in different ways. For example, some store the P1 data separately in the archive index as a means of preserving single instance storage, whereas others store it in the archive store itself. This creates a very special requirement at migration time that neither manual methodologies nor vendor extraction tools can support. Evolve has a special capability known as Envelope Reconstruction designed to ensure P1 data is properly captured and re-associated with the original P2 data during a migration. Contact Akaibu to discuss this feature and its relevance to your project. Q13. I want to move to a hosted Exchange service - can Evolve help? Yes. Customers wishing to switch to a hosted service such as Office 365 or Mimecast can use Akaibu Evolve to migrate their archived data. Also bear in mind that Akaibu Evolve can help you move out of a hosted service at a later date. Tuesday, Page 6 October 7, 2014 Copyright Akaibu, Inc PAGE 6

7 Q14. We are involved in a demerger and need to split up our archive. How does this work? Evolve can filter items by user, user groups, folder and dates, thus enabling data to be incisively selected and migrated to Exchange or Office 365. Evolve also has the capability to re-write all addresses in sender and recipient fields so that the is usable with any new domain naming or recipient-addressing conventions. Q15. How can we remove legacy archive shortcuts or stubs from users mailboxes? Akaibu Evolve includes extensive mailbox management services which include the ability to delete shortcuts to legacy archives as users are switched to the Exchange/Office 365 environment. Additionally Akaibu Evolve can survey mailboxes for legacy shortcuts so that data items can be migrated into Exchange/Office 365 only when the user has kept their shortcuts for these items. If items that had been deleted by end users were migrated back into Exchange this could be confusing. Evolve can also account for the scenario where shortcuts have been moved between folders or forwarded to other users, ensuring s are in the correct place post-migration, and that all shortcut owners still have access to the s they had access to pre-migration. Q16. How is Akaibu Evolve licensed? The core Akaibu Evolve is licensed according to the volume of data you wish to migrate. For more information please contact [email protected]. Q17. Do I need to provide systems to run Akaibu Evolve on? Unless provided by your chosen Evolve partner, you will need to make available one or more servers for a short time-period. You will also need access to an SQL database. Akaibu, or an Akaibu partner can advise you on pre-requisites. Q18. Can new connectors be commissioned for development? Yes. Some of the current product functionality has been sponsored by other platform vendors. However, if you would like other connecter types added, please contact Akaibu Ltd. Q19. How can I find out more? You can visit our website at or contact Akaibu Ltd. By phone, at (North America), or [email protected]. Tuesday, Page 7 October 7, 2014 Copyright Akaibu, Inc PAGE 7