FIVE TIPS FOR A SUCCESSFUL EMAIL ARCHIVE MIGRATION TO MICROSOFT OFFICE 365 WHITEPAPER

FIVE TIPS FOR A SUCCESSFUL EMAIL ARCHIVE MIGRATION TO MICROSOFT OFFICE 365 WHITEPAPER

Introduction Microsoft Office 365 is a new powerful office productivity solution that replaces multiple on premise applications (e.g. Exchange and SharePoint) with new cloud-based versions along with exciting new cloud-based applications all designed to boast your end user s productivity, communication and collaboration. The most popular on premise application that companies are migrating to Office 365 is the Exchange Server email and calendaring solution. However, before you decide to migrate the on premise Exchange Server to Office 365, there is one important question you must address: Does your current on premise Exchange Server have an email archive attached? If your answer is YES, then you should reconsider your strategy for its continued existence going forward. Will it still be usable with the Office 365 Exchange On-line? Does it make financial sense to keep it? Has the archive vendor scheduled it end of life? Will its continued usage raise problems with your regulatory compliance or ediscovery processes? Office 365 s email capability offers important new features for organizations with legacy email archive systems and promises to be the single solution for both live email and archive email. Key Office 365 email features include: Expanded mailbox capacity Automated retention management and legal holds In-place ediscovery And free mailbox archiving But before you make the move to Office 365, there are five key areas which require careful consideration. In the following sections, we will discuss each area in detail to help you best prepare for your migration to Office 365. 1. How much data do I have in the on premise Exchange system? The key question you must first ask yourself is, how much data do I have in Exchange? Your Exchange capacity will depend how the email archive platform was deployed. Before we jump into topics like stubbing and journaling, let s first examine your Exchange system s basic mailboxes stats. How many mailboxes in total do you have? How much data is contained in each mailbox? How much data is contained in each archived mailbox? When moving to Office 365, there are three basic enterprise plans E1, E3 and E5. The E1 plan provides 50GB of capacity. This sounds like a lot, but depending on the length of service for a given mailbox, this may be too small. The E3 and E5 plans include unlimited mailbox capacity which are the best plans for larger organizations. Depending on the size of your mailboxes, you must select the right plan that provides the needed capacity. As you measure the size of each Exchange mailbox, do not forget to add the archive data to the total capacity, as both the Exchange mailbox contents and the archive mailbox content should be migrated into Office 365. You do have the option of leaving the archived email in your legacy on premise archive but issues will arise as end-user try access archived emails or your attorneys engage in ediscovery processes. The Office 365 mailbox capability is split into two sections. The first section serves as the active mailbox and the second serves as the end-user s Personal Archive. An industry best practice is to migrate the live Exchange mailbox contents into the new live mailbox and migrate the archive mailbox contents into the Personal Archive.

2. What do I do with Inactive Mailboxes? It is very common for mailboxes to remain in the Exchange system after an employee leaves the company. When moving to Office 365, you have the option of moving these inactive mailboxes into the cloud for long term retention for business use, regulatory compliance, or legal discovery. The good news is that Microsoft does not charge you a license fee for an inactive mailbox in Office 365. Once you migrate the on premise Exchange and archive mailbox contents into Office 365, you should disable the mailbox by applying a legal hold on the entire inactive mailbox. The mailbox contents are now preserved and cannot be altered but can be searched when the need arises. Using the new in-place ediscovery feature of Office 365 (plans E3 and E5), all mailboxes, both active and inactive, can be searched for legal discovery. To learn more about this important feature, you can read more on the TechNet Exchange Team Blog. 3. What do I do with mailbox stubs? Email stubs (or pointers) are a confusing concept, but because the concept is so important when migrating the on premise email to Office 365, it s a good idea to look at them in a little more detail. The most important (and highly marketed) feature of email archiving solutions was to automatically remove email and attachments from Exchange and move them to the archive to reduce Exchange storage requirements and supposedly increase server performance. The user was presented with a link in the original email, which they would click to access the email and attachment in the archive (if one existed). The purpose of stubbing was to keep mailbox capacity in check. It worked very well. Using stubbing, Exchange Administrators could set a mailbox cap and solve the problem of Exchange storage growth. Good for Exchange, but you can imagine how the archive capacity grew exponentially. Depending on the length of service for your email archive, the total size of the archive could exceed Exchange by 10 times (or more). Before you migrate your Exchange email to Office 365, you must do something about the stubs. One choice is to simply delete them, but this will case a severe user backlash. A second choice is to use the native replace stub command in the archive solution, if one exists. The trouble with this method is that it can potentially cause un-repairable damage to email. In addition, it is likely impossible to re-hydrate all the stubs in-place in Exchange, due to lack of storage capacity. The best practice to manage stubs for migration is to re-hydrate all the stubs in-flight as they migrate from Exchange to Office 365. Archive360 Archive2Anywhere has an exclusive stub management feature called OnePass Migrate. OnePass Migrate is the only migration tool that manages stubs with in-flight stub rehydration, and it also preserves the original email and its properties and Meta information (Figure 1). All of this is very critical for compliance and legal discovery. Client who have used improper methods of stub management have caused un-repairable damage to their email.

Message Stubs (Contain critical metadata) Stub ReHydration TM Legacy Archive Messages Message, stub and metadata are recombined Complete metadata Forensically sound Chain of custody Complete, forensically sound email Figure 1. Recombining email stubs with archive email in a forensically sound manner is critical 4. What if my email is (or should be) on Legal Hold? Lawsuits have become a common problem most organizations face as they conduct business. Lawyers have learned to target corporate email systems for ediscovery to its legally rich content as well as a strategy to cause the discovered party as much cost (and pain) as possible in an attempt to get the defendants to settle quickly. Over the years, organizations began to rely on email archives as their searchable ediscovery repository. Corporate attorneys counted on email archives to be the organization s copy of record for email and to prove chain of custody and defensibility. As litigation was anticipated or started, corporate attorneys could search the archive and place responsive content on legal hold and review it later for possible inclusion in their ediscovery response. An important point that you should be cognizant of when you are migrating your legacy email archive to Office 365 is that email stubs can contain discoverable metadata so as the migration takes place, special care must be taken when recombining the archived email message with the Exchange mailbox stub. If not done correctly, evidence can be destroyed opening you up to a charge of spoliation. The good news is that Office 365 provides a full feature set to support legal holds. The challenge is how to move the archived email into Office 365 in a legally defensible manner without putting into jeopardy the legal hold, destroying metadata or loosing content all together. Handling potentially relevant content subject to legal hold is an important responsibility and should not be taken lightly by you or the migration provider. Archive360 s Archive2Anywhere perfectly preserves all email content, metadata, and properties, including legal hold status and sets the corresponding legal hold once archived in Office 365. To learn more about legal holds and how they are supported in Office 365, you can read this article posted in Microsoft TechNet.

5. What should I do with Journal Data? Some companies, because of regulatory retention requirements, have enabled Exchange journaling. For those of you who aren t familiar with it, Journaling is a long standing capability of Exchange systems that was introduced to address the need for companies in the financial services industry to meet very prescriptive preservation requirements. When Journaling is enabled on an Exchange server, all traffic sent and received from specific email boxes is copied and stored in separate Journal so that journal content cannot be altered or deleted guaranteeing it to be a copy of record. Legacy email archiving solutions took advantage of this feature to capture and store journal content in the archive. If your company Journals specific mailboxes, then as part of your email system migration to Office 365, you must decide on a proper strategy for managing your Journal data. Key to managing journal data in a defensible manner is to manage the journal envelope properly. Migration solutions that extract the email contents from the envelope lose the original recipient list of names contained in the Journal envelope causing a potential charge of destruction of evidence. A best practice is to save the entire journal envelope to preserve the email and the recipient history. A potential issue arises for companies relent of journaling migrating to Office 365. Microsoft has stated that Office 365 should not be used to store journal data. The journal data consists of email from multiple mailboxes which is not compatible with the Office 365 model of keeping each mailbox and its content separate. This means that companies with journaling requirements that are considering migrating to Office 365 should get both a technical and legal opinion on the move. Wrap-Up Microsoft Office 365 is an exciting new cloud-based communication and collaboration. For email, Office 365 offers a single place to store your active and archived email. With the E3 and E5 plans, you have unlimited email and archive storage space available and with built-in retention/disposition policies, powerful search capability, and in-place litigation hold, your organization can now manage and archive all your email in one place allowing you to stop paying the expensive legacy email archiving annual support. You should carefully plan your move of your legacy email archive to Office 365. With proper planning, there is no reason why the migration cannot be completed on schedule, in budget, and in a defensible manner. Migrating inactive mailbox, legal hold data, email stubs, and journal data are not show stoppers if you deploy the right email migration solution and follow industry best practices. Once all of the on premise email (both Exchange and the legacy archive) is moved to Office 365, you and you end-users will quickly enjoy the advantages for ease of use, cost, productivity, and compliance/ediscovery preparedness. Your end users will be able to store email as long as they wish (no more mailbox limits) and you can centrally manage all mailboxes automatically for compliance retention rules and legal considerations. And as an added benefit the Office 365 Compliance Center allows you to search across all email, place and remove legal holds, and export email into PST files for 3rd-party legal analysis and ediscovery response.

About Bishop Technologies, Inc. Bishop specializes in Archiving, Data Migrations, Data Management and Cloud Infrastructure. We serve companies of all sizes in North America and have worked with nearly every industry in our 13 years of business. To meet clients growing requirements to cost-effectively manage, protect and leverage their data, our Solution Architects work with organizations stakeholders, in tandem with our Account and Project Management teams, to design and implement the best strategy. Our network of partners and vendors continue to evolve their technologies to bring the best on-premise, cloud and hybrid solutions to the market. We add value to organizations information systems by providing innovative technologies, established processes, an experienced team, and high-quality managed services. Bishop consolidates your IT initiatives by offering a vendor-neutral and comprehensive strategy to manage your organization s most valuable data. Bishop: Keeping Your Data In Check. http://www.bishopit.com About Archive360 Archive360 is the leader in email archive migration software, successfully migrating more than 10 petabytes of data for more than 500 organizations worldwide since 2012. Archive2Anywhere, the company s flagship product, is the only solution in the market purpose-built to deliver consistently fast, predictable migration rates, with verifiable data fidelity and defensible chain of custody reporting. A global organization, Archive360 delivers its solutions through a network of specialist partners. http://www.archive360.com Copyright 2016 Archive360, Inc. Archive360 and Archive2Anywhere are trademarks or registered trademarks of Archive360, Inc. The list of trademarks is not exhaustive of other trademarks, registered trademarks, product names, company names, brands and service names mentioned herein are property of Archive360, Inc., or other respective owners. All rights reserved. WP104