Discover how the true cost of migrations can often be hidden.

Everyone likes a freebie, there’s no denying it. But the truth is, when something’s free, it usually comes at a price.

Free software is a good example of this. Usually it’s just a “taster”, something to whet your appetite or grab your attention, and further down the line you end up paying for a more robust version.

Free migration software is like this; a good foundation to start, but if you want all the bells and whistles to do it properly, then it’s worth paying a little extra.

Free Migration Tools

Migrations are incredibly complex, and the results can make or break a business. It’s not the kind of thing you want to put into the hands of the cheapest option available.

There are basically three serious options when it comes to free migration tools; Microsoft FastTrack, Google Workspace Migrate and third-party open-source software

Open-source software

There are plenty of free open-source software migration tools out there, and most of them are fit for purpose if you’re only moving small amounts of data that have no real importance. But when it comes to a large-scale data migration that’s part of the growth and development of your business, you will want to set your sights a little higher.

As you might expect, open-sourced migration software has limitations. The software takes longer to set up, will usually only migrate certain things (like files and folders, but not emails), and, most importantly, has a higher fail rate, meaning there’s more chance of your migration turning into a catastrophe.

As the software is open-sourced, there will be no guarantee of security because it will come without accreditation. For something as important as your company’s data, you should only ever use software that meets international standards of security, like CloudM.

Microsoft

FastTrack is a migration service provided by Microsoft and it’s available to all Microsoft 365 subscribers for free.

While FastTrack is suitable for simple file migrations, but it was not designed for anything more complicated.

When you are handling a big migration project, you want to be kept abreast of its progress.There is no update on the project until it’s complete, so there is no way of telling how long is left, how much data has been moved, and which files are still pending.

If you have additional requirements, special instances that need specific attention, or simply want someone to help fix unforeseen issues, then unfortunately there’s not much help available.

If any issues come up, there is no telephone or video support, only an email address to use, so a response is usually slow, by which time the issue might have done serious damage.

FastTrack is only available for customer tenants with 150 or more licenses and is also limited to a certain number of users, so for larger projects, you need more than one migration to move your data.

So to sum up Microsoft’s free migration tool, it might be worth it if you’re a small business with basic data to transfer. Anything larger or complicated should be left to bespoke migration software.

Google

For full migrations, Google will only transfer from one Google domain to another. That means if you’re on Microsoft or some other platform, you can’t use their tool.

Google does have GWMMO (Google Workspace Migration for Microsoft Outlook), but some categories of Email, Calendar, and Contacts are not supported to import in Gmail, while Journal entries, Outlook Notes, tasks, and RSS feeds aren’t imported at all through this method.

Google Migration is not always the speediest: you are allocated one server for your project and you’re migrated on that one server.

In fact, for more complicated migrations, Google often turns to third-party software themselves – like CloudM. So if your migration project needs to happen quickly, securely and effectively, you can cut out the middleman and come to us directly.

What can go wrong?

Unfortunately, a lot could go wrong during a data migration, which is why you should never go for the cheapest option. As we mentioned, migrations are complex, and the bigger the job, the more issues can potentially arise.

Losing data, leaving user information behind and data corruption are just a few of the common problems seen during a large migration.

These issues can have serious, real-world consequences. From reputation damage to hefty fines for data protection breaches, a problematic migration can be a nightmare for a company.

Any kind of problem is going to mean more work for your IT team – because here’s the thing with free migration software – if things do go wrong, who do you talk to about it? Who is accountable for lost or corrupted data? What number do you call to speak to someone? Who do you email about the issue?

Invariably, the answer is no one. And that’s where the true cost of free migration tools appears.

Why you should use us

CloudM has a 99.8% success rate when it comes to data migrations, with over 68 million users migrated in 107 countries.

We offer a host of advantages over a free migration service, including speed, security, accountability, and perhaps most important of all, peace of mind.

Migrations can be stressful, and if you choose free software, you’ll increase that stress exponentially. You’ll have no regular updates, no sign of how successful your migration has been so far, and no idea of how long is left.

With us, you’ll have a personalized account manager, someone to oversee your project and keep you up to date with developments. You’ll be in full control of your data, you’ll know exactly what has been transferred and when, how far the project has come, and any issues that have arisen. Plus, with 24/7 product support available you know an expert is never far away.

We also provide Delta Migrations, allowing your business to carry on as normal during the project, so you have zero downtime. A Delta Migration works by migrating all your historical data – say everything up until the past three months – and then once that’s done, we do the last three months over a weekend when no one is working.

Working with us rather than a restrictive service or open-source software with no experts on hand gives you more options and greater agility in your migration. We can course correct if something comes up, and of course, handle everything for you instead of making you do all the work as free software would.

If done incorrectly, problems during a migration can lead to downtime, data loss and, in worse-case scenarios, legal troubles.

It simply isn’t worth the risk to use free, open-source software for something as important as your data. Let the professionals handle it.

You’re not just paying for the software, you’re paying for peace of mind. You’re paying for data security and accountability if anything goes wrong. You’re paying for a successful migration, and at the end of the day, that’s all that matters.

How much is keeping users on Archive User licenses costing your business and how much could you save if you used CloudM Archive instead?

Gone but not forgotten.

Even years after an employee has left your business, data compliance regulations such as GDPR and Freedom of Information requests require you to keep their data in some form.

You obviously don’t want to keep these legacy leavers on a full Google license as it is a) expensive and b) it means that if the former employee (or someone else) can access the account, they can use your business’s applications and access sensitive business data.

So, businesses like yours have had to find ways to keep the data (and allow it to be searchable and restorable) without allowing access, and preferably, cheaper.

Historically, they would simply change the user’s full license to a VFE (Vault Former Employee) license. This license SKU was free and archived the data to Vault. Perfect!

What is the issue then?
Well, Google introduced the AU (Archive User) license as a replacement for the VFE, and charged for it (currently ~$60 per user per year). If you had 1000 users on a VFE, this would cost you $60,000…every year (+ any additional offboarded users you apply an AU license too).

Now, this is obviously cheaper and more secure than a full license. But, it’s not exactly pocket change when it’s coming out of your budget (especially when it used to be free).

How does CloudM Archive solve the issue?
The only real legal requirements for data when an employee leaves is to make sure that it is stored somewhere, can easily be restored or retrieved (down to a single file or email) if required, and deleted after a set amount of time. CloudM Archive does all of that for you!

CloudM Archive will automatically send the data of any offboarded user straight to a Google Storage bucket that you own and control, as an optional step in our innovative Offboarding Workflow process. If the step is in the workflow for the user, you do not need to do anything except press a button to trigger the offboarding.

If you need anything back (e.g. you receive a Freedom of Information request), CloudM Archive allows you to see all the data stored in the Storage bucket, indexed by user, so you can quickly find and restore any and all the data you want, and you can restore it to any user within CloudM Manage. All in a matter of minutes.

Oh, and when the time comes when you want are legally obliged to delete the data, CloudM Archive will use data retention policies to automatically purge the data when it’s been stored for a set time. Remember John who left 7 years ago? Of course you don’t. You started 4 years ago. CloudM will remember to delete his data on time so you don’t have to (and so you don’t get hit with a massive data regulation fine too).

And, best of all, you don’t need to pay for a Google license (full or AU) for the user you just archived. You just need to pay for CloudM Archive and the cost of storing your data in your Google Storage buckets, which, even when combined, works out considerably cheaper than an AU license. We’ve done the math and some businesses could be saving up to 75%. Whether that’s Euros, Dollars, Pounds or Pesos, that’s gotta look good on your balance sheet.

The full Google license can even be removed from the user and returned to your license pool as part of the offboarding workflow, ready to be instantly reassigned. You will only ever need to pay for the licenses you actually use.

This all sounds great, right? But, what if it would actually work out cheaper to keep a specific power user’s data on an AU license instead of incurring the cost of storage? Well, we’ve got you covered as well. Simply create a Smart Team of Power / High Volume users and create a bespoke offboarding policy that has the “Apply Google Archived User (AU) license” step included.

CloudM Archive is already helping (and saving) organizations around the world, big and small. If you would like the opportunity to cut the costs and manual effort of keeping former employee data, why not have a quick 15 minute call with one of our expert CloudM Team.

If you manage a Google Workspace domain, you will be very familiar with Organizational Units (OUs) and how they can be used to group users together, making managing a large number of employees significantly easier.

But, one of the disadvantages we found when using OUs was that, inherently, they were very structured and hierarchical – A user could only belong to one OU at a time.

If a user was in the Marketing OU, they would have access to all the shared Marketing resources. But, if you wanted to add the Marketing Team Lead to another “Manager” OU so you could assign a more complex offboarding policy, they would lose access to the Marketing resources. Far from ideal. Far from flexible.

So, we created a way to give you the flexibility to group users together, without breaking your OU structure, whilst assigning bespoke workflows and automations to meet the requirements of their role. We call these group types Smart Teams.

Let’s take a look at a “Manager” Smart Team, as an example, and explore some of the cool things you can do in CloudM:

• You can make the Smart Team dynamic and set it so users that have a tag added to their profile (e.g. Manager) will be added to the group automatically.
• You can set a bespoke Email Signature template for all Managers. For example, you may wish for your Management Team to have their personal LinkedIn accounts displayed instead of the company account.
• You can automatically share access to Management calendars and documents.
• You can set a different offboarding policy that might include additional steps (such as requiring manual confirmation or archiving data to a different Storage bucket).
• You can set a custom Security policy that requires a Manager to use a more complicated, and secure, password to access CloudM (as they are more likely to have admin access to features).

Smart Teams aren’t just reserved for creating custom policies for Management, and you don’t have to make such wholesale changes as shown on the previous example.

In fact, some of the best uses of Smart Teams are when you want to make one small change to a few policies or share resources with a select group of employees.

• You can add a custom footer to the bottom of the email signature of any user that is going to attend an event or convention, so that your customers, partners and suppliers that are attending know you will be there.
• You can share calendars and documents with all your First Aiders, regardless of location or department.
• You can set a quicker, less detailed offboarding policy for all temporary/seasonal staff.

Want to find out more?

Check out our Smart Teams video on YouTube and visit our CloudM website, or book a 15 minute discovery call to speak to one of our brilliant team.

YouTube

Make it easy to send branded email signatures when using a domain alias

ack in the very early days of CloudM, we had a problem!

Even though we were talking to customers and selling as CloudM, our emails (and their signatures) would often come from our parent company, causing unnecessary confusion.

“Who are you?”, we would hear. “I’ve been talking to CloudM”. And, where there is confusion, there’s doubt. “Who am I really dealing with here?” Even if it was never brought up as a reason, we knew it was costing us – both business and reputation.

Well, the easiest way to get around this was to use a domain alias address, allowing our employees to effortlessly switch between their parent company and CloudM email addresses depending on who they were talking to, with all responses sent to the same inbox. Even today, we have centralized staff that need to represent both sides of the company.

With so many companies now having multiple brands and domains under their umbrella, using an alias is getting even more common. Did you know that, in 2020, Unilever NV had 1,181 individual domain names including Ben & Jerry’s and Dove?

But, this brings up another problem – How do you make the email signature represent the brand you are sending the email from?

Introducing Domain Alias Signatures – a new feature for Gmail within our CloudM Email Signature Management module that allows you to set bespoke email signatures that will be displayed depending on which email address the user decides to send the email from.

It could be as simple as the primary email address displaying your company logo, and the domain alias email address displaying the logo of a specific brand.

Or, completely bespoke with different brand colors, fonts, contact details, and social media links, to name a few. And the best thing is that most of this information is added as a variable so that, as soon as a field such as job title is changed in CloudM, it is automatically changed on the email signature, quickly and easily keeping it up to date.

Domain Alias Signatures is just one of many new and exciting feature changes that we have added to our redesigned Email Signature Management module in the last 6 months, joining our brand new Template Gallery and the ability to schedule signatures for the primary domain, with many more updates in the pipeline.

Want to find out more?

Check out our Smart Teams video on YouTube and visit our CloudM website, or book a 15 minute discovery call to speak to one of our brilliant team.

Data security is one of the most prominent issues of the digital age. Constantly evolving and changing, data compliance can be a difficult area to navigate and can be a huge project for any IT department. When a user is offboarded, finding a solution to help you deliver the complex needs surrounding data can be a tricky challenge and if data compliance isn’t withheld to the letter, you could be left with some serious headaches.

In 2021, CloudM created the holy grail of solutions for your offboarded user data. Archive, an industry-first feature, was designed to help businesses by managing compliance, retaining/restoring data as needed, and purging the data when it’s longer needed.

As the footprint for data becomes more and more embedded within our civilization, Archive and other tools like it will become indispensable, helping you to navigate those difficult and sticky data headaches, and keeping you compliant.

So, what’s the best solution for you?

Well, there are three core solutions that will help you stay compliant and efficient, all whilst working to your needs and requirements as a business.

What can we learn from this?

Every business needs something different, and for that, there must be a relatively flexible solution. This is why Archive can work as a solution on its own or as a hybrid solution.

Get in touch with our team of experts for your free demo today.

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