The Cloud is an attractive place to be when you are trying to reduce complexities and costs within large and diverse organisations. However, there are still a few businesses whose systems are not already in that complex place, with their applications and content controlled by on-premises (and in many instances out of date) versions of their chosen systems.
So, when offered the option of moving to the Cloud, no matter how attractive it sounds, the physical journey getting there can be a major blocker to most businesses due to the perceived pain, time and the costs involved in the data migration of huge amounts of corporate data while maintaining business-as-usual.
Interestingly, within most organisations, the applications tend not to be the challenge. Here at T-Systems, the applications that we run in SharePoint, our mail systems and our collaboration systems, have proved to be moved to the cloud quite readily.
But it is the files and folders, the plans and discussions, the blogs and the web pages which can be an issue for some people. It can be, for example, the project work spaces for Y2K updates from 19 years ago; the data that has come across from mergers, from re-organisations that took place three management teams ago that present the headache, the barrier, the reason NOT to move.
Cloud based versions of applications such as SharePoint, Jive, and IBM Connections etc. tend to have structural differences from their on premise counterparts. It might be, for example, that there is a difference in data types, or in the ability to personalise. Remember, these are multi-tenancy systems and some concepts are lost due to the nature of multi tenancy – for instance you cannot have standalone Discussion Forums in IBM Connections Cloud; you get around this by creating discussion communities and then creating multiple forums within them. None of it is rocket science, but it does take some working out. It is classic big data processing – fixing millions of files, thousands of comments, gigabytes of metadata. But businesses do not have the luxury of migrating in years, or even months. The move must happen transparently and with zero business impact.
Another main challenge ties into security and ownership. New users have to be created in the Cloud for the re-locating business. So what happens to all of the content that you want to keep, if the person who created it no longer works in the company anymore? Or they have moved to a different role or department, or may not be part of the merger or acquisition teams. How do we assign content ownership?
These challenges can create sufficient uncertainty within customers to the extent that they may defer, delay or abandon their move to the Cloud – it’s just too complex, just too difficult, and they assume it cannot be done.
But of course it CAN be done and it IS done – by specialised teams such as T-Systems Vamosa in Glasgow – who spend all of their time modifying and moving data into the Cloud. It’s highly specialised work, but with the use of dedicated tools, experienced practitioners and a tight control of processes, it is indeed possible to ensure that the pain of content migration to the cloud does not stop the project in its tracks. Moving 150 Tb of data for technology giants to the cloud, or 250Gb for a luxury brand conglomerate are two examples where T-Systems Vamosa achieved what some assumed to be impossible; but both were delivered by Vamosa experts. Similarly, when a major European airline and a top 5 US bank wanted to move from Jive to IBM Connections, or when businesses divested of whole business units, they needed specialists who could deliver their goal, with a guaranteed deadline, 100% accuracy and zero risk. And they found it with Vamosa, the anywhere-to-anywhere content migration specialists in Glasgow.
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A division of T-Systems, Vamosa Technologies specialises in content migration to cloud, on-premises and hybrid cloud systems. With two decades of customer migrations, Vamosa Technologies has experience with a comprehensive range of leading enterprise content management systems. To learn more about services from Vamosa Technologies, please read our case studies and whitepapers or contact us.
