Microsoft Data Migrations: 5 Mistakes to Avoid, Says Quest

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Data migration can be tricky business, especially as VARs and MSPs assist with customers with on-premises upgrades or cloud migrations involving Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint and/or Office 365. Quest Software, which specializes in IT management and data migration solutions, has spotted five common mistakes customers and partners make during application and data migrations. Plus, Quest believes there are four core pillars to success with such migrations.

Tri Nguyen, product manager at Quest Software, described some of those issues and solutions in this Talkin' Cloud FastChat Video:

To recap, those five common data migration mistakes are:

1. Poor Planning: “[Customers] don’t take the time to do their due diligence and make sure they understand the scope [of their migration]. You know the saying, 'Failure to plan is like having a plan to fail'? It truly is the case here.”

2. Underestimating the User and Organizational Impact: “Migrations are extremely disruptive, and most customers … don’t understand that these processes are resource-intensive. … You don’t want to impact their business productivity.”

3. Lack of a Coexisting Strategy: “Sometimes … it takes weeks, months or years to finish a migration. In that case, they want to make sure they can continue to collaborate like they did before when they were on one system during that entire transition.”

4. Forgetting About Backup Protection: “There is no better time to have a backup than before a migration. [Customers] tend to not do that but [backups] actually need to occur more frequently and more than just once a day — they might want to do it every four hours or so. So in case something does happen, they can revert back to the latest backup they had.”

5. Failure to Focus on the Management: “Everyone has narrow vision — they think the nirvana is just getting that platform, but they don’t think after the fact, like ‘Wait a second, I need to also make sure that I manage that environment, that I maintain it and I can overall help lower the total cost of ownership of that environment,’ whether that’s reducing risk, compliance, helping change management — all of those aspects of the management.”

Four Core Pillars to Success

Quest, he said, can help customers through a four-pronged strategy of prepare, migrate, coexist and manage. “We feel a holistic approach is the best way to approach a migration vs. blindly starting a migration project,” he said.

“We will come in and essentially provide customers the ability to do a complete analysis of their environment — get a total snapshot of their environment and help them plan better from what they’ve done in the past or lack thereof,” he said. “Then we help them with the migration phase, making sure there is no impact to the end users while they do their migrations, regardless of whether it’s a weekend cutover or a long duration. We will ensure they will continue to collaborate with one another.

“On the coexistence side it’s really all about that: Regardless of what environment they are in we can make sure all the things that they use and you and I use every day [such as] our e-mail systems, etc., we make sure there is no impact on their business productivity or employee productivity," he added. "And finally management: We can … reduce that total cost of ownership.”

As more companies look to hosted environments and even the cloud to store their data, a growing number of MSPs are adding data migration to their services palette. Quest has the breadth and depth of solutions that address a multitude of data migration environments, Nguyen said. Interested MSPs can check out Quest’s cloud migration lineup on the company’s website.