Companies of all sizes (enterprises and SMBs) that plan to move from the current cloud storage to another must understand the intricacies of cloud-to-cloud data migration. Having complete clarity over cloud-to-cloud data transfer processes helps businesses identify risks, understand the cost involved, and plan accordingly.
Here are five insightful pointers that can help businesses plan their cloud-to-cloud data migration in an informed way:
1. Direct Data Access Raises Security Risks
It goes without saying that security is one of the biggest concerns in cloud-to-cloud data migration. Since business data includes sensitive information in most cases, companies of all sizes and geographical locations must choose transfer processes that do not involve direct data access.
Third-party cloud data migration tools such as CloudFuze that read and write data at API level are a secure option for businesses. CloudFuze integrates with the official API of all the leading cloud services. For example, when transferring data to OneDrive from Google Drive, CloudFuze uses the permissions of Microsoft and Google’s APIs. This eliminates the need to access source cloud data directly and therefore ensures optimum security.
2. Transferring Data Along with Metadata Is Critical
One of the crucial aspects of cloud-to-cloud data migration for businesses is transferring metadata along with the actual data. Metadata helps businesses be efficient with the data, and therefore the data must be transferred with the metadata intact.
Apart from metadata, businesses must also transfer sharing permissions to ensure that the collaboration flow associated with the data is not interrupted.
For example, when migrating to SharePoint Online from Box, moving data along with metadata, permissions, comments, versions, external shares, shared links, and embedded links help businesses maintain operational efficiency in the destination cloud.
3. Relevant Conversion of Source Cloud-specific Files Is Crucial
In many cases of cloud-to-cloud data migration, businesses need to migrate source cloud-specific files. In such cases, it is important to have a solution in place that can convert the source cloud-specific files into a relevant format supported by the destination cloud.
For example, when moving from Dropbox to OneDrive, businesses that need to migrate Dropbox Paper need to use a data migration tool like CloudFuze that converts Dropbox Paper into .DOCX files in OneDrive and SharePoint.
4. Retention of Folder and File Structure Helps Maintain User Hierarchy
One of the biggest challenges businesses face in cloud-to-cloud data migration is retaining the user hierarchy. Even if the admin configures user accounts at a hierarchical level in the destination cloud, it is still important to retain the folder and file structure of the source cloud.
Businesses must ensure that the migration tool they use can migrate and retain the folder and file structure with the exact permissions intact.
5.Transferring Incremental Changes Completes the Migration to Perfection
Cloud-to-cloud data migration can take several months or even a year for businesses that have a lot of data and user accounts to move. And during that time, there will be a lot of incremental changes that the end-users will make while working on the source cloud.
It is a must for businesses to transfer these incremental changes and update them to the data that is migrated to the destination cloud. This process helps maintain the accuracy of the data migrated to the destination.
No comments:
Post a Comment