Evaluating the cost of free migration tools

Transcription

1 Evaluating the cost of free migration tools

2 Table of Contents What is MigrationWiz?... 2 What are free tools?... 3 What s in this whitepaper?... 3 MigrationWiz UI: Abstracting complex migration scenarios to an intuitive user experience... 4 Free tools: The cost of meeting minimum requirements... 7 Software requirements... 7 All free tools require a costly certificate... 7 You may need to upgrade your Exchange server before migrating with free tools... 7 You may need to deploy new server software onsite before migrating with free tools... 8 The cost of meeting minimum software requirements is not incidental... 8 Process and workflow... 8 Microsoft public folder tools require expensive pre-migration processes... 9 Microsoft cutover Exchange migration tool: it s all or nothing... 9 Microsoft staged Exchange migration tool: an adequate solution for organizations with surplus time and engineering resources MigrationWiz migration model: a flexible, fail-safe approach that maintains mail flow throughout the duration of the migration process MigrationWiz: Enterprise performance with the tick of a checkbox Microsoft IMAP migration tool: Free tools: The cost of running peripheral software User forums are not an adequate support plan for your migration About BitTitan What is MigrationWiz? BitTitan s MigrationWiz is a cloud-based data migration solution designed to meet the needs of individuals, IT administrators, consultants, system integrators and service providers that are transitioning to or from a cloud-based or document storage solution. In addition to migrating traditional mailbox data such as , calendars, contacts, tasks, and journals, MigrationWiz also migrates PSTs, public folders, documents,

3 and other data types. MigrationWiz is managed and configured from your web browser. All migration processing occurs in the cloud in one of five secure, highly performant MigrationWiz distributed datacenters. What are free tools? Software companies that provide messaging solutions offer a number of free tools in an attempt to make migration to their platform easier. For some organizations, these tools may offer a slightly better alternative to a full manual migration. But upon closer inspection, when you factor in the cost of supporting most free tools they often fall short of delivering a cost-effective solution. For example, free migration tools offered by Microsoft are designed for highly prescribed scenarios with fairly restrictive sets of supported dependencies and requirements. On-site server software, additional server configurations, and costly certificates are often required. The free tools offered by Microsoft may work for many organizations that have the resources to plan, configure, and test a migration, and who have the server hardware and software that often needs to be installed. But in all cases, the costs associated with operating free tools are shifted to supporting the tools through software licensing, hardware, and engineering costs. What s in this whitepaper? This whitepaper looks at some of the costs that are associated with operating free tools that are offered by Microsoft. The goal is two-fold: To help you evaluate the cost of migrating your current solution to or from a Microsoft solution To illustrate the capabilities of MigrationWiz in the context of a simple, per-mailbox migration cost As noted above, for many organizations, the free tools offered by Microsoft may make sense according to some organizational needs. However, because free tools impose a number of requirements, are highly bound by specific dependencies, and do not include 24/7 dedicated support, determining a true cost for your migration is difficult. The MigrationWiz pricing model is simple: cost is based on the item (mailbox, document, archive, or public folder) and how many of those items that you wish to migrate. Planning for your migration cost is easy math. See the Pricing page for more information ( To review lineitem costs and potential profit increases associated with running BitTitan migration solutions see the whitepaper Increasing your Profitability with BitTitan Migration Solutions.

4 MigrationWiz UI: Abstracting complex migration scenarios to an intuitive user experience The biggest expense of most IT-related projects is usually costs associated with engineering expense. The more you can reduce the time that engineers and consultants are spending with the various phases of a migration project (planning, installing software, configuring, testing, moving data, troubleshooting, retries, etc.) the more time and money you will save and the less downtime your users will experience. Therefore, a critical variable required for calculating migration cost is the time commitment required by IT professionals and engineers to perform the end-to-end migration. For example, a migration project that introduces software installations and additional on-site server configurations will drive the cost of your project up. Additional minimum software requirements and dependencies imposed by free tools often require upgrades before you can even start your migration. Some of these requirements are likely to require existing in-house expertise, costly consultants, or in-house training for software that may only be installed and run once. And should you encounter a blocking issue while using free tools, your support options are limited to user forums, online FAQs and articles, or a costly engagement with support or consultants. FIGURE 1: MIGRATIONWIZ UI CREATE A PROJECT

5 MigrationWiz has been designed to minimize these costs. MigrationWiz is run entirely from a web browser, without any software to install. With MigrationWiz, you use a single UI to manage the most complex of migration projects, eliminating the need to log in remotely through firewalls and onto multiple servers to configure, manage, and monitor your migration. The MigrationWiz UI is an intuitive design that makes sense for moving data. Regardless of whether you are moving mailboxes, public folders, PSTs, or documents, your project is defined by specifying a source server and a destination server. From there, you can configure advanced settings to batch up users and credentials, to optimize performance, or to customize your migration according to your organization s specific needs. After you have specified the source and destination servers, the items you want to move, and the appropriate credentials, you then submit your project for migration, where you can monitor the process in real-time. FIGURE 2: SELECT A SOURCE IN MIGRATIONWIZ SIMPLE, INTUITIVE DESIGN The straightforward UI and migration engine provided by MigrationWiz afford the same source/destination model for all data types, thereby providing an intuitive experience across projects of all data types. In other words, the UI that you use to migrate mailboxes is the same UI that you use to migrate public folders and documents. It s a simple model that does not impose extensive training requirements for you or your staff.

6 FIGURE 3: SELECT A DESTINATION IN MIGRATIONWIZ COMPATIBLE MIGRATION SCENARIOS ARE HARD-WIRED IN THE UI. The engineers at MigrationWiz have done the hard work to abstract the complexity of migrations across different solutions. To help eliminate compatibility issues and further reduce the cost of testing and troubleshooting, the matrix of supported source and destination solutions are hard-wired into the UI. Therefore, you cannot configure an incompatible migration set. The engineers that have developed MigrationWiz have migrated over a million items across multiple systems over the years. As a result, they are obsessed with data fidelity as a core competency of migration. To provide the most robust migration solutions across platforms, MigrationWiz preserves and ports relevant data properties whenever possible.

7 Free tools: The cost of meeting minimum requirements The free migration tools that are offered by Microsoft work well for the highly-bound scenarios for which they were designed. So if your existing IT infrastructure already conforms to the requirements supported by the free tools, and if your migration workflow plan fits into the supported scenarios, then running the free tools may make economic sense assuming migration goes as planned. To begin calculating the cost of migration with a free tool, start by evaluating the delta between the infrastructural requirements imposed by the free tools versus the current state of your infrastructure. The goal is to calculate the expense of bringing your current infrastructure in compliance with the scenario requirements of the free tool. There are two broad areas that bear investigation: software requirements, and process and workflow. Software requirements The cost of using free tools materializes as you evaluate the software infrastructure that such tools require. The free tools offered by Microsoft require specific versioning and may require installation of new software and services. Bringing your existing infrastructure into compliance with the minimum requirements imposed by the free tools can be a costly endeavor. All free tools require a costly certificate All of the free tools offered by Microsoft that migrate Exchange organizations to Office 365 (cutover, staged, hybrid, and public folder) require that you install, configure, and enable Outlook Anywhere in your Exchange organization. Outlook Anywhere, also referred to as RPC over HTTP, requires an expensive SSL certificate from a commercial certificate authority (CA). With MigrationWiz, you can migrate Exchange to Office 365 without deploying a certificate from a commercial CA. You may need to upgrade your Exchange server before migrating with free tools Microsoft s free tools also have specific version requirements that you must comply with. For example, you cannot run a staged Exchange migration on Exchange 2010 or Exchange If you are running the wrong server version on-site, then you will need to either upgrade your Exchange server or use a different free tool. In the case where you are running Exchange 2010 or 2013 on-site and you want to migrate to Office 365, you will have to deploy a hybrid deployment, which is costly and wasteful if your migration plan does not require long-term coexistence. MigrationWiz will migrate a robust set of messaging-related data for Exchange 2003 or later. You can view the entire matrix of supported source systems (including Lotus Notes, Zimbra, Groupwise, etc) and the associated data types that BitTitan migrates at

8 You may need to deploy new server software onsite before migrating with free tools To run Exchange staged migration or the hybrid scenario you must install, configure, and run DirSync in your on-site Active Directory. Depending on the size of your organization, installing DirSync may require a full SQL Server license and dedicated hardware. Aside from potential hardware and licensing costs of installing the software, DirSync requires a significant planning effort. It s important to understand DirSync functionality in the context of your migration plan. Running DirSync absolutely dictates how you must proceed in your migration. This is because synchronizing with DirSync creates and assigns permissions to objects in your tenant Office 365 directory, and depending on your configuration, DirSync may also write back to your local Active Directory. Additionally, how you configure DirSync determines how and where you manage and create users. Without careful managed oversight, deactivating and reactivating DirSync can inadvertently overwrite cloud directory data. MigrationWiz does not require that you install any server software onsite. The entire migration, even complex staged and coexistence scenarios, is run from a browser at your location. In fact, after you configure a migration, you can kick off, monitor, and manage your migration from most smartphones. The cost of meeting minimum software requirements is not incidental To account for the full per-item cost of migration, you must calculate the cost of upgrading, installing and configuring software to meet the minimum requirements imposed by the free tools. Given the complexity of many of these software installations, the IT expense should not be considered incidental to the migration process. The types of software installations covered here are ephemeral: after you migrate, you will decommission all of the software you ve just installed. Therefore, the cost associated with installing temporary software cannot be amortized over time. MigrationWiz charges a per-user license fee that is a one-time, easy-to-calculate cost for your migration project. There are no onsite server installation requirements; we migrate any version of Exchange to Office 365, and we do not require a commercial certificate. Process and workflow Every migration plan is unique. Each organization has specific needs that will impact the process and workflow of their migration. The toolset that you use to migrate your data should conform to the needs of your organization. Most free tools impose strict boundaries around scenario support that may require additional IT expense. The cost of the per-item migration creeps up with each additional restriction or limitation that is imposed by free tools. Therefore, when you evaluate the cost of running free tools in the context of process and workflow, you are answering these questions, Does the free tool provide the flexibility for my unique migration needs? If not, what is the cost to bring my workflow into compliance with the tool s requirements? Below, we look at four of Microsoft s most popular free migration tools: public folder migration tool, cutover Exchange migration

9 tool, staged Exchange migration tool, and the IMAP migration tool. While these tools may be helpful in some scenarios, be sure to understand the requirements they will impose upon your workflow as you plan your migration costs. Microsoft public folder tools require expensive pre-migration processes Migrating public folders with the free tools supplied by Microsoft requires careful, detailed planning and a complex set of multi-step procedures to complete. You must download several scripts and support files and you must run multiple shell cmdlets on-site and remotely to the Office 365 tenant organization. Additionally, the public folder migration tool from Microsoft recommends that public folders larger than 2 GB be broken into smaller folders, or should not be migrated at all. If your organization has many public folders greater than 2 GB, you will need to calculate the cost of manually sorting these directories in order to comply with the Office 365 restriction. If you are using MigrationWiz to migrate public folders, you just configure your source and destination public folder servers, enter your credentials, and migrate. MigrationWiz will do the work to sort and normalize the data and migrate it into the Office 365 datacenter. Microsoft cutover Exchange migration tool: it s all or nothing While the cutover Exchange migration tool is attractive in its simplicity, to make it cost-effective, your organization must conform the workflow and supported scenarios imposed by the tool: The cutover tool is limited to Exchange organizations with less than 2,000 mailboxes. The cutover tool moves all mailboxes that are in your on-premises Exchange organization: it s all-ornothing. And you don t select how migration groups are batched, nor can you perform any filtering on the data as part of the migration process. All-or-nothing means you must cutover on the tool s timeline, not yours. If you have run DirSync previously, then you can t run the cutover Exchange migration tool. Messaging migration projects are an ideal time for organizations to take stock of their messaging needs and to optimize the migration to support long-term efficiencies and cost savings. Licensing changes, purging and archiving of old data, and other related issues should be built into your migration plan. MigrationWiz provides flexibility for customizing your migration workflow to take advantage of the transition to the cloud. You can use MigrationWiz to save costly consultant time by automating many of the housecleaning tasks associated with transitioning to a new messaging solution. For example, before you migrate to Office 365, you can batch users into different profile groups and automate Office 365 licensing according to each profile group. You can also use these profiles to specify what kind of data types to migrate for the users in the group. You can also filter on data. For old, deprecated data, MigrationWiz provides robust filtering so that you don t have to migrate it at all: just leave it behind.

10 Alternatively, MigrationWiz lets you configure the filtering options to migrate older, but important data straight into archived mailboxes in the cloud. Finally, MigrationWiz allows you to prefill the source mailboxes before you switch MX records and then backfill them after you cutover. You can switch the MX records on your timeline when it suits you. This flexibility allows you to manage the workflow and timing of the migration project according to your business needs. Alternatively, the Microsoft cutover migration tool will continue to synchronize mailboxes from the on-premises organization to Office 365 after you have migrated, but before you ve switch the MX record. However, the Microsoft tool performs only a once-a-day sync until you switch. The cutover workflow is disruptive for normal business needs and does not leave a comfortable bailout option or buffer for errors that may arise during the migration process. MigrationWiz gives you flexibility and customization to optimize the workflow and timeline of your migration process as dictated by your business needs. Since you decide when to cutover, if you should run into errors during migration, normal mail flow continues until you are ready to change the MX record. Microsoft staged Exchange migration tool: an adequate solution for organizations with surplus time and engineering resources Microsoft s staged Exchange migration tool imposes a number of restrictions on your migration workflow. For small and medium organizations that have the expertise and the engineering resources to work through these various limitations, the Microsoft staged migration tool may make sense. But for SORGs and MORGs that demand workflow flexibility and who do not have engineering expertise or funding to plan a complex messaging migration to Office 365, Microsoft s Exchange staged migration tool is not likely to pencil out in the final analysis. And for large IT organizations tasked with migrating thousands of mailboxes, Microsoft s free solution requires substantial engineering investment to provide the predictability, performance, and workflow flexibility that enterprise business needs demand in a messaging migration solution. Consider the following limitations of Microsoft s staged Exchange migration tool: Can only be used for Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007 organizations with more than 2,000 mailboxes, but each batch of mailbox migrations must be less than 2,000 users. Moves mailboxes only; the Exchange staged migration tool does not move recipient types such as contacts, mail-enabled users, or distribution groups. To move those types of recipients, you must install and run DirSync on-premises. Requires multiple updates to each mail user object in the onsite Active Directory before and after the migration phase. Part of this process run during the migration process requires that you manually run scripts in the cloud and on-premises to convert mailbox objects to mail-enabled objects before you change the MX record.

11 Does not have a rollback option. After a mailbox is synced to the cloud, the Exchange staged migration tool configures forwarding on the mailboxes in the on-premises environment. A catastrophic failure at this point will result in a mixed environment that is expensive to sustain and disruptive to business until the migration resumes or the on-premises mailboxes are restored with an out-of-band recovery. Is not optimized for performance. The Microsoft staged migration tool requires a complex planning and manual process to optimize data throughput during migration. The tool also uses a client protocol (RPC/HTTP) for migrating data rather than the Microsoft-recommend Exchange Web Services protocol. MigrationWiz migration model: a flexible, fail-safe approach that maintains mail flow throughout the duration of the migration process The Microsoft staged Exchange migration tool requires a number of nontrivial Active Directory updates during the migration process. These updates are required to sustain mail flow performance during the migration until the organization s MX record is updated to point to Office 365. During this time, Outlook will continue to open the on-premises (empty) mailbox until another Active Directory update is made on the corresponding user object. After the update is made, users will then have to create a new profile and open the migrated cloud mailbox. There are a number of issues that may arise between the time that the first batch of migrated mailboxes is started and the final batch of mailboxes is successfully migrated. If there are any failures during this time there is not a simple rollback option with Microsoft staged migration. The migration model that Microsoft uses for the staged migration tool is a cut-over model, where mail is removed from the on-premises mailbox and moved into the on-premises mailbox. Such a model significantly increases the impact of failures or any other issue that increases the time until the MX record can be pointed toward Office 365. MigrationWiz uses a copy model. In this model, all mailbox data (including s, calendars, tasks, contacts, notes, journals, rules, and permissions) is copied (not moved) from the source and then pre-filled into the Office 365 destination organization. You can point the MX record to the Office 365 organization when you are ready and you know that your data is there. After you change the MX record, MigrationWiz does a delta backfill of any data that came in since the last copy. At any time before you change the MX record, you can pull the plug on your project and all of your user data will still be on your onsite servers. By using MigrationWiz date filtering, you can even rollback after you change the MX record. And since MigrationWiz s copy migration model allows all mail to continue flowing into the on-premises Exchange organization, you do not have to make updates to your Active Directory during the migration project.

12 MigrationWiz: Enterprise performance with the tick of a checkbox In the context of performance, the Microsoft staged migration tool is not an enterprise-ready tool. First, you must manually calculate how to configure the migration endpoints to optimize for migration performance. Specifically, you must determine the number of migration endpoints your project will require, and then you ll need to figure out how to balance the performance for incremental vs initial synchronization at each endpoint. Finally, you must take into account how your mailboxes are distributed across the on-premises organization in the context of the behavior of the staged migration tool to favor Autodiscover endpoints versus hard-coding FQDNs endpoints. The Microsoft staged Exchange migration tool uses RPC/HTTP to copy mailbox data to Office 365. The RPC/HTTP protocol is optimized for single client access to Exchange, not for high-throughput server performance. In fact, for best performance, Microsoft recommends using the Exchange Web Service (EWS) protocol for migrating data to Office 365. Specifically, Microsoft recommends running migration over EWS in impersonation mode for the best performance of all. FIGURE 4. CONFIGURING IMPERSONATION MODE ON THE EWU PROTOCOL IN MIGRATIONWIZ ADMIN TOOL. With MigrationWiz performance optimization has been designed into every component of our solution. MigrationWiz uses EWS by default. And configuring impersonation mode is enabled by checking a box in the MigrationWiz admin tool. In fact, if you are migrating mailboxes to Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft Office 365, you will find it difficult to find another migration solution that can extract or push data faster than ours. MigrationWiz performance is only dependent on the performance of the source and destination systems. We will never be the bottleneck. We are connected to some of the fastest networks in the world and run servers fully dedicated to migration tasks with very low utilization and hundreds of optimizations. Because our migration infrastructure is hosted by us, the faster your migration completes, the lower our computing costs, so we are just as motivated as you are to make migration as fast as possible.

13 Microsoft IMAP migration tool: The IMAP Migration tool is the only free tool offered by Microsoft that allows you to migrate from non- Microsoft solutions. Since IMAP, by design, only holds mail items, Microsoft s support for migrating other messaging related data (calendars, contacts, tasks, etc) from foreign systems does not exist. And aside from migrating IMAP mail data from Exchange servers, the IMAP migration tool supports migrations from only four IMAP server types. On the other hand, MirgrationWiz supports migrating robust messaging data (such as mail, calendars, contacts, and tasks) from Groupwise, Gmail, Lotus Notes, and Zimbra, to Office 365 and Exchange Server. Free tools: The cost of running peripheral software From a business perspective, software and software service companies prioritize their work to support their core business. In almost all cases, the development of free migration tools is peripheral to the core business. Sometimes free tools are designed and built to support a very specific scenario, but often the tools emerge from internal test teams, side projects, or are harvested from customer support efforts. As discussed earlier, such tools can provide value for organizations that meet the tools minimum requirements and supported scenarios. But even those organizations that meet the requirements may find the run-time migration experience to be slow, error-prone, and more costly than alternative methods. Ultimately, the business of migration and the software, infrastructure, and resourcing to support that business is peripheral to the core businesses of software and service companies that provide free tools. The core business of BitTitan is moving and protecting data. Specifically, MigrationWiz has been designed from the ground up to move messaging, public folders, and documents between disparate systems. The core business of MigrationWiz is to optimize migration software, cloud infrastructure, and resourcing for scalability, performance, uptime, and security. MigrationWiz provides real-time reporting and error management, with 24/7 support. As you attempt to quantify the per-item cost of your migration plan, you must take into account how runtime events can impact your migration. It s nearly impossible to predict the issues and errors you may encounter in a migration. However, you can evaluate the relevant components of your migration solution to estimate costs associated with recovering from run-time events. User forums are not an adequate support plan for your migration Even the best-laid planning may result in unexpected issues during the migration process. For most organizations, minimizing user downtime is a critical component of the migration plan. Unplanned user downtime is costly and stressful. Working directly with a knowledgeable support expert is the best way to insure success when you hit an unexpected critical issue during migration.

14 When you run free tools, the support you receive is reliant on the licensing terms of the software you are eventually migrating to. Generally, you are encouraged to post your issue to the user forums. Should you decide to call Support, reaching an expert in the migration process is likely a costly call or a series of callbacks as your issue is bounced between different support personnel. In all cases, your per-item migration cost creeps up as you wait for resolution. MigrationWiz s 24/7 support is included with all migration projects. With a combined experience with hundreds of migrations, support engineers at MigrationWiz are experts in migration solutions. There are no tiers in the MigrationWiz support organization: every support engineer at MigrationWiz has direct access to engineers at our datacenters and to the engineers that build our software. MigrationWiz support engineers take pride in their personal SLA response times and are committed to seeing your project through. While there is a guarantee to respond to your issue in 24 hours, 95% of issues are responded to in under four hours. Every attempt is made to maintain a single engineer to take ownership and see through each issue. All engineers do everything they can to make your migration a success, even going beyond the scope of MigrationWiz when necessary. MigrationWiz support engineers understand that migration to Office 365 is a business priority and they ll work with you to make sure your migration is a success. About BitTitan BitTitan is the IT change automation expert that delivers end-to-end solutions for migration and onboarding challenges. Unlike competitive solutions, BitTitan removes barriers to change, including complexity, risk, cost and time constraints. With IT change automation, users can be current, have a choice, maintain control and eliminate chaos. Its globally recognized products, MigrationWiz, DeploymentPro, UserActivation, Data Encryption and SmtpLogic, deliver tailored solutions for today s challenges, such as Office 365 onboarding, and archive migration, as well as Office 365 security and controls. The credible, safe and trusted choice for both direct and partner channels, BitTitan has migrated more than 1.5 million mailboxes to the cloud in more than 100 countries. For more information, visit