By: Murali Urs(Country Manager, Barracuda Networks, India)
Organizations and consumers alike
are becoming increasingly dependent on online communications and high-tech IT
networks, but sometimes can a more traditional low-tech solution work better?
It’s
becoming a connected world
It seems possible now for us to do
almost anything online, from managing our finances or paying a bill, right
through to doing our grocery shopping, watching TV or sharing our photos with
friends. We are encouraged to store our data ‘in the cloud’, and to download
our music over the internet rather than going out and buying a CD. In this
highly connected world, the links between all our computer systems and end user
devices are becoming of critical importance.
There is little point in having the
very latest iPhone or smart TV if it doesn’t have a good and reliable network
connection, so vast sums of money are continually being invested in upgrading
our communications infrastructures. Traditional copper phone lines are being
replaced by fiber broadband links, and phone companies are introducing high
speed 4G mobile data networks.
Microsoft has been delivering online
services for many years, but this has recently become the major focus for the
company. Online solutions for consumers include products such as Hotmail (now
rebranded as Outlook.com) and Xbox Live, and for businesses there are products
such as Office 365, Lync and CRM Online. They have also acquired other online
solutions such as Skype, and now operate one of the largest communications
networks in the world. And looking to the future, the next version of Windows
is designed around the assumption that any device it runs on will be connected
to the internet or some other sort of network.
Given this commitment by Microsoft
and other similar organizations to doing everything online, I was interested to
learn about one development by them that appears to contradict this trend.
Being
online is great, but getting there can be problematic
Office 365 is possibly the most
successful product Microsoft has ever launched, and it is continually being
enhanced to expand existing capabilities and add new features. But customers
moving to Office 365 can face a big problem: how to all get their existing data
migrated from their local office or datacenter into one of the central
Microsoft datacenters.
The only way for them to do this at
the moment is to upload it via the internet, but the issue with this is that
the internet, and cloud services such as Office 365, are designed and optimised
for high volumes of small individual transactions such as web pages or email
messages. This transactional infrastructure is not well suited for uploading
significant numbers of files, large volumes of historical email and other such
data. Customers moving their data to Office 365 are finding that their data
uploads are ‘throttled’ to prevent the volume of data involved impacting the
operation of the Office 365 service for other customers.
They are also finding that their
internet connection, whilst being extremely fast at an individual transaction
level, simply does not have the bandwidth to migrate all their data within a
reasonable timescale. The end result of these problems is that migrating
existing data to Office 365 can be a complex and lengthy exercise.
Designing around the problems
Here at Barracuda we are very aware
of the issues customers have been facing when migrating their data over the
internet into Office 365, and we took these into account when we built our PST
Enterprise product. As a result, it is a great example of how good product
design can overcome technical issues such as these.
PST files have been a problem for IT
administrators for many years. Created by end users using Outlook, and used by
them to store email data locally, they are an unreliable and insecure data
format, and represent an ongoing risk to the business as well as being a
significant support overhead. Moving to Office 365 provides organizations with
the ideal opportunity eliminate the use of these files, and bring the data they
contain back under central control. PST Enterprise provides an ideal solution
to locate all PST files wherever they exist, and migrate the data from them
into Office 365.
When migrating data from PST files over
the internet to Office 365, PST Enterprise is designed to move data on an
message-by-message basis (rather than moving a whole file in one go). This
matches the transactional nature of the internet, and makes best of network
capacity as well as proving a more reliable and robust solution. It also moves
data from each source location (such as end user laptops) directly to Office
365, taking a parallel processing approach, rather than routing all data via a
central server and creating a potential network bottleneck.
Could
a low-tech solution be a better approach?
Microsoft publish a Roadmap for
Office 365, describing what they have planned and what is being worked on
currently for Office 365. Reading through the ‘In Development’ section
recently, I noticed a new feature they call “Drive Shipping”.
To quote Microsoft, “The ability to
import data into Office 365 in a quick and easy manner has been a known
constraint of Office 365, and a solution for this issue has emerged as a key
request from customers”. In response to this, they are going to make it
possible for customers to put their data on a USB drive or similar device, and
ship the physical drive to one of the Microsoft datacenters. Microsoft will
then copy the data from the customer’s drive directly into Office 365.
Whilst at first sight it might seem
that resorting to using physical media to move data around is a retrograde step
given the investment that is being made in network technology, this low-tech
solution is actually a pragmatic answer to the problem and recognises the need
to use the right technology for the task. One of the key features of the
internet is that it has a very low latency (i.e. data is transferred almost
instantly), but the amount of data that can be transferred in a given period of
time (the bandwidth) is always going to be limited. Contrast this with shipping
a physical device; it may take a day for the drive to get from the customer to
the datacenter (so therefore it has a very high latency), but the ‘bandwidth’
or amount of data that can be transferred each time on a set of disk drives is
vast.
Latency is not important when
migrating existing data such as email to Office 365. It doesn’t matter if it
doesn’t get there immediately, what is more important is that very large
amounts of data should be transferred predictably and reliably, and this is
exactly what Drive Shipping can achieve.
Our PST Enterprise product will be
equally well suited to migrating data to Office 365 using Drive Shipping when
that becomes available later this year. The product is already able to locate
and migrate all the data from PST files, wherever they exist, direct to a
chosen location. In order to use Drive Shipping, customers will simply have to
configure it to move data to the drive that they are going to ship to
Microsoft.
It’s
still not a good idea to migrate everything
Online solutions such as Office 365
offer almost unlimited amounts of storage, but it still makes sense to migrate
only the data that is actually needed. Just because Drive Shipping means you
can now migrate all of your existing data very easily, it doesn’t mean that you
should.
This is a great opportunity to put
in place a strategy for data retention and deletion, and to use policy-based
migration tools such as Barracuda’s PST Enterprise. These can automatically
identify and delete redundant or duplicate data, and only migrate information
that still has value to the organisation. This approach will allow an
organisation to reduce or eliminate the risks associated with storing large
amounts of unmanaged files and emails, as well as supporting their IT
requirements for Compliance and eDiscovery.
Whichever approach you use for
migration, either the high-tech route of sending data via the internet or the
low-tech route of drive shipping, moving less data will also make your
migration project quicker, cheaper and easier to manage
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