Soarsoft International focuses on controlling information governance and data storage costs at 2014 CIO Challenge

Information volumes continue to grow at an unprecedented rate, particularly randomly generated and unstructured data belonging to the modern information worker. This is also a result of the way we interact and transact with the many new business and electronic platforms on mobile devices, cloud-based infrastructure and services.  This increases complexity with regards to managing information and risk as well as gaining control of the retentions and disposition in accordance with legislation and the new privacy requirements around personal information. As a result, information governance requires a new ‘in-place’ mind-set around the management of data and where it lies. Fortunately, it may not be as difficult to implement as it seems. 

‘Intelligent’ Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) has become a critical tool for organisations, allowing them to make the most of their data without the requirements for old fashioned heavy lifting, centralisation or platform heavy ‘move to manage’ scenarios. Soarsoft International will be taking part in the CIO Challenge in October and provide an in-depth discussion of how these issues are affecting many organisations and how to manage information governance and data storage costs. 

ILM is essential in assisting organisations to gain an understanding of what data they have and what data can be safely or ‘defensibly’ deleted in a controlled process, while also preventing storage costs from spiralling out of control. Having the appropriate policies, processes and technologies to drive the management and defensible deletion of Redundant Obsolete or Trivial (ROT), and often ‘risky’ information is essential to maintaining good corporate governance and control over personal or information that may pose a risk.   

Furthermore, hoarding data indiscriminately beyond its usefulness and even beyond its required retention periods, is a costly exercise. This cost includes not only the storage space required, but the costs of backup, redundancy and network connectivity, as well as the potential hidden risks within the redundant data. Without proper information governance, this risk is impossible to control. As a result of recent legislation such as the Protection of Personal Information (PoPI) Act, there is also a growing requirement to ‘tighten’ up data governance and the policies and practices around data within an organisation. 

The information landscape has changed dramatically in recent years, and ILM tools and processes need to adapt to meet these changes. Intelligent ILM, information governance and data management solutions are vital for giving visibility to what data organisations have out there “in the wild” and giving the ability to report, monitor and take action on data wherever it may be, onsite or in the cloud.   

Visit Soarsoft International at the CIO Challenge on 29 and 30 October 2014 at Protea Hotel Balalaika in Sandton to find out more about the changing information landscape, how ILM tools need to change and adapt to these challenges and how intelligent ILM solutions are vital to prevent data storage costs.  

Editorial contacts:

Soarsoft International

Chris Hathaway

Director

Tel: 021 200 2393

Email: chrish@soarsoft.co.za

Evolution PR

Lesley Rencontre

Tel: 011 462 0679

Email: Lesley@evolutionpr.co.za

Opinion Piece: Control data at its source for more effective unstructured information governance

As data volumes increase and information is generated by more and more sources, organisations have a pressing need to gain better control of their data, particularly data housed on-site and in hybrid or cloud-based solutions. This has become increasingly important in light of the fact that a plethora of imminent laws and legislation that require this control. One such example is the Protection of Personal Information (POPI) Act, which was approved by the President in November 2013 and is due to come into effect during the course of 2014. In addition, the King III report also provides recommendations for ensuring information privacy, which all listed companies are compelled to comply with.

In order to gain the necessary control of data to comply with POPI and other legislation, it is vital to first build insight into the existing information an organisation is already storing. Only then can this data be effectively managed. Given the number of data sources in a typical organisation, both structured and unstructured, and the added complexity of cloud-based data sources, effective data governance and control cannot be an ‘after the fact’ process. Organisations need to focus on governing the information where it exists, at its source and within the applications that the data resides, in order to not only comply but also to enable effective analytics to provide the information that people require to do their jobs.

Unstructured data has become a large proportion of the information that exists within many organisations today, and is received from a variety of sources. This includes emails and exchange servers such as Microsoft Exchange, public folders, file sharing systems like SharePoint, and even cloud-based solutions such as Office 365, Box, Dropbox and Onedrive. Information governance requires that rules, such as security, business and legal rules, be applied to organisational data, including unstructured information, which is often more prolific and difficult to manage compared to data within structured financial systems. Good corporate governance requires process and policy around the management and defensible deletion of information, which needs to be demonstrated to prove that information is not just randomly removed, deleted or lost.

The impending POPI Act will require organisations to process and store personal information in a manner that is fair, secure and responsible. The onus is on organisations to prove that this has been done, at the risk of penalties for non-compliance. The King III report also emphasises the protection of personal information, specifically stating that “The board should ensure that there are systems in place for the management of information, which should include information security, information management and information privacy”, wherever the data may exist.

Policies and processes need to be applied for good corporate governance, as well as to prepare for the enactment of POPI and comply with other existing legislation.  However, manually applying and enforcing rules across multiple data sources is not only inefficient, but impractical given the need for an available audit trail and the volumes of data generated by the majority of organisations and their users. Unless the rules can be automated into the infrastructure with precision, ever-increasing data volumes that remain uncontrolled will eventually overwhelm an organisation, leaving them unable to prove compliance or manage their risks.

However, while new Information Governance tools are available to assist with this process, they are simply an enabler to action policies – the policies themselves are the foundation. Using an appropriate solution from an experienced service provider partner will enable organisations to better manage and govern their unstructured data for improved insight and data governance. Advanced technology now allows organisations to maintain a catalogue of all of their unstructured content, while leaving the data itself in place within the applications they reside in, negating the need to move or copy vast quantities of data to archives or similar dated solutions. This catalogue can then be used to provide a unified view of all unstructured data within the organisation, and allow for rules to be automatically applied. This will ensure business and security policies are put into place at the data source for more effective management and governance.

Imposing information governance controls on data at its source not only allows for the simplified automation of policies, but also enables organisations to maintain insight over the vast volumes of data without the need for complex infrastructure and expensive processing and storage. Action can be taken using alerts, in-place holds, defensible deletion, eDiscovery and export of specific information. This can then be implemented around the necessary security and compliance elements with a full audit trail. In addition, full-text indexes and regular expressions (like Credit Card and ID numbers) enable keyword searching, which simplifies eDiscovery, since precise data sets can be easily identified within vast data volumes.

With new regulations such as POPI due to come into effect, and recommendations such as King III, data governance is more important than ever. In today’s information-driven world, where unstructured data is becoming increasingly prevalent, governing data at its source is a necessity to avoid over-complexity and unnecessary costs, especially when cloud and hybrid solutions are in use or on the roadmap as they are today for most organisations. This requires constant insight into the information within an enterprise, as well as awareness of what information exists across a variety of unstructured data sources. By governing data at its source organisations can gain enhanced visibility as well as the ability to impose targeted controls with speed and precision, enabling them to always keep ahead of changing compliance regulations and laws while also controlling the associated costs to achieve this.

Editorial contacts:

Soarsoft International

Chris Hathaway

Director

Tel: 021 200 2393

Email: chrish@soarsoft.co.za

Evolution PR

Lesley Rencontre

Tel: 011-462 0679

Email: Lesley@evolutionpr.co.za

The CIO Challenge JHB welcomes Soarsoft International and Konica Minolta on board!

The exciting CIO Challenge takes place on the 29th & 30th of October in Sandton.

Today CIO’s are business leaders as much as they are technology leaders ~  The CIO Challenge will draw compelling context from cross-industry CIO’s & IT Heads where we’ll address current trending CIO challenges and the impact these challenges will have on business.

Some of this being addressed include:

Management of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) ~ With the commercialisation, affordability and integration of personal and business data within smart devices such as phones and tablets, more end-users than ever before are integrating these devices into both their business and personal environments.How are CIO’s dealing with the risks and challenges associated with end user owned devices such as how to enforce controls onto these devices and the legislative impact thereof.

Management of Enterprise Mobility ~ Many organizations are finding value in the productivity of end-users when providing mobility to some or all of their staff either through the use of laptops, mobile phones or tablets. Not to be confused with BYOD where the end-user owns the device, management of enterprise mobility is the management of enterprise owned devices that enable end-users to operate from within and outside the perimeters of the enterprise.How are CIO’s dealing with the risks and challenges associated with mobility such as data loss through theft; costs of enabling communications outside of the enterprise; or the threat of malware due to assets operating outside of the enterprises controlled environment.

Management of Big Data ~ With the recent popularization of Cloud Computing, and the drive for better efficiencies through centralization and virtualization, the management of big data has become more of a pertinent issue.How are CIO’s dealing with the risks and challenges associated with the capturing, curating, storing, searching, sharing, transferring, analysing, and visualizing the “big data” in their environments to better identify trends and opportunities for the enterprise.

POPI Compliance ~ The South African government has recently developed the Protection Of Personal Information Act which sets conditions on how enterprise can process information. This new piece of complex legislation is considered to be a hybrid of the United States, United Kingdom and Australian information protection acts making it a first of its kind.How are CIO’s dealing with the risks and challenges associated with POPI Compliance such as illustrating the value of complying to the act to the enterprise, and understanding the impact of what non-compliance will have on the enterprise.

This is the right place to find answers to common questions, such as ‘how do you get started?’, ‘what tools and technologies do you need?’, ‘how can you measure ROI?’ and much, much more.

The programme will bring together expert keynotes, real world case studies led by senior CIO’s who are tackling these challenges in their organisations. Join us to better understand how you can address these challenges and bring more value to your enterprise.The challenge covers key topics discussing BYOD, Mobility, Big Data, Security and POPI compliance.

Key speakers include:

• Chris Hathaway - Soarsoft Africa – (Get insight and take control of your Data on-site and in the cloud)
• Jeff Kahn - MD Synergy Financial Services (Creating a winning IT team)
• Francis Cronje - POPI specialist (How is POPI going to impact our enterprise and organisational capabilities)
• Ina Meiring & Ahmore Burger Smidt - Directors - Werksmans Attorneys - (POPI insights for Data Management & The Need for a Comprehensive Breach Plan)
• Sello Makhubela - Divisional Head Internal IT - SITA (Developing and implementing BYOD Strategy in the Public Sector - Risks & Challenges)
• Beza Belayneh - CEO - South African Centre for Information Security (Using Big Data analytics to mitigate risks of evolving cyber threats with intelligence-driven security)
• Robert Marshall - MD- Prodevolve (A communication Revolution: How CIO 's can change the corporate communication landscape using new media and mobile technologies)
• Chandima Miyanadeniya - CIO Aon South Africa- (Implementing an enterprise mobility strategy to manage mobile devices to protect company systems & information)
• Nardus Breitenbach - Independent Executive Consultant - (Align IT and Business for Big Data Success)
• Konica Minolta - (Enterprise document management solutions presentation)

To secure your seat today and receive a 10% discount contact Juliano Velacci, 021 712 2882

www.itconferences.net

Soarsoft International announces Binary Tree recognised as Messaging Partner of the Year at 2014 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference

Soarsoft International, a specialist of Information Governance, archive, migration, messaging and collaboration solutions and distributor of Binary Tree solutions in Southern Africa, has announced that Binary Tree, a leading Microsoft Exchange and Office 365 migration solutions company, will demonstrate its award-winning enterprise messaging software products at the 2014 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) in Washington, D.C. from 13 to 17 July 2014. WPC brings together Microsoft partners from around the world to connect with each other and Microsoft representatives. At the conference, Binary Tree will be honoured as Microsoft’s 2014 Messaging Partner of the Year for its outstanding solutions and services. 

“Soarsoft is committed to bringing the very best international solutions to our customers. This recognition for Binary Tree by Microsoft, one of the global messaging giants, is an affirmation that our customers have access to solutions that will add value to their organisation,” says Chris Hathaway, Director at Soarsoft International.

Steven Pivnik, Binary Tree CEO, states, “Being recognised as Microsoft’s Messaging Partner of the Year completely validates our core business of producing market-leading email migration solutions for enterprise customers. I could not be happier for our team, and we are excited to spend a week with our Microsoft and other partner colleagues.”

As messaging specialists for more than 20 years and a Microsoft Gold Messaging Partner, Binary Tree provides messaging and collaboration transformation technology and solutions for the Microsoft platform in the cloud, on-premises, or in hybrid environments. Earlier this year, Binary Tree’s Exchange migration product, E2E Complete, won Best of TechEd 2014 in the Messaging and Unified Communications category.

About Binary Tree

Binary Tree is a singularly focused global provider of migration software and solutions for Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, and Windows Server environments. Since 1993, Binary Tree has enabled more than 6,000 customers to migrate more than 30 million email users, and facilitated some of the most complex migrations on the planet. Its software solutions are available for migrating from Exchange 2003/2007/2010/2013 and Lotus Notes to on-premises and online versions of Microsoft Exchange, as well as migrations of Active Directory and Windows Server environments. Binary Tree is a Microsoft Gold Partner, an IBM Advanced Business Partner, and is one of Microsoft’s preferred vendors for migrating to Microsoft Office 365. The Company is headquartered outside of New York City with offices in London, Paris, Stockholm and Sydney. 

For more information, visit us at www.binarytree.com.

About Soarsoft International 

Soarsoft International focuses on Information Governance, Archive, Migration, Messaging and Collaboration solutions, with a successful track record that spans over a decade.  Leveraging the experience gained from some of the largest and most complex information management implementations around the world, we are able to deliver cost effective and successful projects and solutions.  Soarsoft only supports and implements what it considers to be trusted and proven solutions to meet our customers’ specific information management requirements. Soarsoft International continues to evaluate its offerings to ensure they maintain market and technological leadership positions, so that clients are offered the very best and up-to-date advice when assessing their requirements.  Soarsoft International operates throughout Africa and parts of the Middle East and has offices in both Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa.

For more information, visit www.soarsoft.co.za

Editorial contacts:

Soarsoft International

Chris Hathaway

Director

Tel: 021 200 2393

Email: chrish@soarsoft.co.za 

Evolution PR

Lesley Rencontre

Tel: 011 462 0679

Email: Lesley@evolutionpr.co.za 

Soarsoft International partner Binary Tree selected as Best of TechEd 2014 E2E Complete product wins Best Messaging and Unified Communications Product

Soarsoft International, a specialist of archive, migration, messaging and collaboration solutions and distributor of Binary Tree solutions in Southern Africa, has announced that the Binary Tree E2E Complete Exchange migration product has won a Best of TechEd 2014 award in the Messaging and Unified Communications category. Penton’s Best of TechEd awards, co-sponsored by Microsoft and Windows IT Pro, recognise Microsoft partners that offer innovative products and services for the industry. Winners were announced at the Microsoft TechEd North America 2014 conference in Houston, Texas.

This recognition follows Binary Tree’s earlier announcement of E2E Complete 3.4 in February of this year, which featured a long-awaited resolution for enterprise clients looking to migrate their on-premises public folders to Microsoft Office 365. It also included an enhanced migration process to enable preparation, transition, and activation - key components to a smooth and successful migration. These enhancements uniquely positioned Binary Tree as an elite provider of full enterprise migration capabilities for Microsoft users, including legacy Exchange through Office 365.

“The TechEd awards acknowledge products that add business value and represent innovation in the technology space. The Binary Tree E2E Complete solution is a worthy winner of such an award, enabling organisations to more easily migrate to Microsoft Office 365. As a distributor of Binary Tree products in Southern Africa, this award represents an acknowledgement that we offer our clients the best in global solutions for their messaging and migration needs,” says Chris Hathaway, Director at Soarsoft International.

“Large enterprises have been unable to fully embrace Office 365 due to the issue of public folder migration. Binary Tree’s innovative functionality provides an opportunity for companies to more fully realise their investment in Office 365. This ensures that businesses can leverage full value from their move into the cloud,” he concludes.

About E2E Complete

E2E Complete is Binary Tree’s solution for enterprise Exchange migrations between/within forests and also to Office 365. It automates and simplifies enterprise Exchange migrations—dramatically reducing the costs, complexities, and timeline of intra- and inter-organisation, cloud and hybrid migrations. Its advanced automation capabilities, combined with an SQL database, make it easy for administrators to streamline the data collection, scheduling, forecasting, reporting and user communication processes. E2E Complete now includes support for public folders and a migration wizard.

About Binary Tree

Binary Tree is a singularly focused global provider of migration software and solutions for Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, and Windows Server environments. Since 1993, Binary Tree has enabled more than 6,000 customers to migrate more than 30 million email users, and facilitated some of the most complex migrations on the planet. Its software solutions are available for migrating from Exchange 2003/2007/2010/2013 and Lotus Notes to on-premises and online versions of Microsoft Exchange, as well as migrations of Active Directory and Windows Server environments. Binary Tree is a Microsoft Gold Partner, an IBM Advanced Business Partner, and is one of Microsoft’s preferred vendors for migrating to Microsoft Office 365. The Company is headquartered outside of New York City with offices in London, Paris, Stockholm and Sydney. For more information, visit us at www.binarytree.com.

About Soarsoft International

Soarsoft International focuses on Archive, Migration, Messaging and Collaboration solutions, with a successful track record that spans over a decade.  Leveraging the experience gained from some of the largest and most complex information management implementations around the world, we are able to deliver cost effective and successful projects and solutions.  Soarsoft only supports and implements what it considers to be trusted and proven solutions to meet our customers’ specific information management requirements. Soarsoft International continues to evaluate its offerings to ensure they maintain market and technological leadership positions, so that clients are offered the very best and up-to-date advice when assessing their requirements.  Soarsoft International operates throughout Africa and parts of the Middle East and has offices in both Johannesburg and Cape Town South Africa.

For more information, visit www.soarsoft.co.za

Editorial contacts:

Soarsoft International

Chris Hathaway

Director

Tel: 021 200 2393

Email: chrish@soarsoft.co.za

Evolution PR

Lesley Rencontre

Tel: 011 462 0679

Email: Lesley@evolutionpr.co.za

Soarsoft Africa announces the launch of HPs Information Governance Services to mitigate risk for regulated industries

Soarsoft Africa, a specialist of archive, migration, messaging and collaboration solutions and distributor of HP Autonomy solutions in southern Africa, has recently announced the latest HP Information Governance Services built on HP Autonomy technologies. The services are designed to enable compliance officers and legal counsel to manage structured and unstructured data according to business value and risk.

HP Information Governance Services deliver greater control over information assets, supporting organisations in their efforts to leverage the value of information in business-driven processes, operational efficiency, risk mitigation and cost reduction.

“As data repositories continue to grow rapidly within the organisation, our customers are finding it increasingly difficult to shed light on their ‘dark data’.  Data management tools have thus become increasingly important. In addition, the ability to quickly find, monitor and take action on specific information is gaining prominence, largely due to the introduction of regulatory requirements such as the Protection of Personal Information (PoPI) Act and the awareness this has created for good corporate governance around electronic information,” says Chris Hathaway, Director at Soarsoft Africa.

“The ability to automatically monitor and do ‘defensible deletion’ of obsolete and risky information is key for information governance and also reducing the costs and overheads associated with storing unnecessary information. HP’s Information Governance Services help to address all of these needs, adding transparency to the process and assisting our customers to manage their information from beginning to end,” he adds.

A comprehensive approach to information governance
Information governance requires a comprehensive approach that sits at the intersection of people, process and technology. HP Information Governance Services combine industry-leading technology from HP Autonomy with deep domain expertise from HP Enterprise Services to position clients to gain a fast return on their technology investments while successfully supporting business strategy.

 The services component of the solution covers the full business life cycle from assessment and design to implementation and ongoing support. Typical use cases of the portfolio include:

• Records management: A unique combination of consulting services and the HP Records Manager product supports client efforts to capture, search and manage business records from any source.
• Information archiving: HP’s archiving technology can be combined with integration and consulting services to help organisations manage retention and dispose of information to assist in compliance with changing regulations while simultaneously obtaining insights for better business decisions.
• Classification: Expert service combined with HP ControlPoint technology provides a better understanding of where data is stored, how it is used and its business context and value. These HP Classification Services can be delivered at different stages of Information Governance and serve as a phased approach to data clean up, life cycle management and optimisation.

The development of information policies and processes along with an accountability and responsibility framework is vital for any records management and archiving implementation and is an integral part of the HP Information Governance offering.

HP Enterprise Services is leveraging HP Autonomy’s technology to implement, automate and enforce the execution of information policies across the enterprise.

With HP Information Governance Services, clients may experience:
• Reduced risk exposure from compliance with retention regulation and ability to find information.
• Improved efficiency by boosting productivity and efficiency by decreasing the growing volume of uncontrolled data.
• Lowered eDiscovery and investigation costs through automated and repeatable processes.

About HP
HP creates new possibilities for technology to have a meaningful impact on people, businesses, governments and society. With the broadest technology portfolio spanning printing, personal systems, software, services and IT infrastructure, HP delivers solutions for customers' most complex challenges in every region of the world. More information about HP (NYSE: HPQ) is available at http://www.hp.com.

About Soarsoft Africa
Soarsoft Africa focuses on Archive, Migration, Messaging and Collaboration solutions, with a successful track record that spans over a decade.  Leveraging the experience gained from some of the largest and most complex information management implementations around the world, we are able to deliver cost effective and successful projects and solutions.  Soarsoft only supports and implements what it considers to be trusted and proven solutions to meet our customers’ specific information management requirements. Soarsoft Africa continues to evaluate its offerings to ensure they maintain market and technological leadership positions, so that clients are offered the very best and up-to-date advice when assessing their requirements.  Soarsoft Africa operates throughout Africa and parts of the Middle East and has offices in both Johannesburg and Cape Town South Africa.

For more information, visit www.soarsoft.co.za

Opinion Piece: Effective archive-to-archive migrations require specialist tools and expert assistance to ensure you recover your legacy archive data. By Chris Hathaway, Director at Soarsoft Africa

A combination of many factors has necessitated the requirement for Archiving platforms in many larger corporates over the past 10 years. These factors include Legislative and Corporate Governance Requirements, massive volumes of email and other unstructured data, as well as user generated data within files and folders. A key driver for Archiving solutions has typically been the ability to gain efficiencies in dealing with the continuous growth in the storage requirement and subsequent Backup, Continuity and Recovery overheads. In addition, Information Governance, Information Retention and eDiscovery elements has played an equally significant role and in specific cases, have even formed the overriding requirement for the Archive Platforms to date.

Ten to fifteen years on from the first ‘commoditised’ Archive Technologies and vendors, we have had a significant change in the unstructured data ‘Archive’ landscape. This has largely been driven by the requirement to archive the multitude of new and widely used platforms beyond just traditional email, like Instant and Social Messaging, Reuters, and Collaboration Platforms like Lync and SharePoint.  The introduction of ‘cloud’ based messaging and collaboration platforms such as Microsoft Office 365 (as well as Hosted Exchange and SharePoint), Skydrive, Dropbox, Box.net and many more appearing on a regular basis, has significantly changed the location and access to the ‘Source’ data needing to be archived. The resulting ‘hybrid’ combinations of ‘on-site’ and cloud-based corporate information platforms is becoming increasingly common. In addition, a lack of scalability within an archiving solution and the inability to cope with the volume of data over the long-term results in an archive that is difficult to manage, necessitating a migration to a new platform.

This shift in the requirements and flexibility required by modern archive platforms has resulted in many large, established vendors of these Archive technologies needing to completely re-write their product code and tool sets, at the risk of losing out to more flexible and even cloud-based archive platforms and services.  This, in combination with the continuous pressure on IT departments to reduce costs and leverage the ‘cloud’ for storage and email within corporate environments, has seen the requirement to implement, migrate or move to a modern archive platform that deals with cloud and on-site based information. Archiving solutions may also have become obsolete or end of life, lacking the functionality to support hosted Exchange or cloud solutions such as Microsoft 365. In some cases customers may want to consume a cloud-based solution like Microsoft’s Office 365, but still need to archive data in South Africa due to Data Sovereignty requirements. Large migrations to newer versions, acquisitions and mergers are also often a trigger for archive migrations.

Each archive solution is engineered differently to others and therefore requires skills and knowledge specific to the particular software solution. Unsuccessful archive migrations can have significant consequences to a business, and it therefore pays to get migrations right the first time. Users are constantly accessing the archived data, there are huge volumes of data collected in these platforms, and Source platforms such as email servers are highly reliant on them to off-load data for efficiency.  As a result of these factors, archive migrations at first seem nearly impossible and overly complex to action.

For these and other reasons, the need to conduct archive-to-archive migrations is on the increase, and as the requirement has grown so too have the specialist services and tool sets required to complete them. However, for the majority of organisations it is a significant challenge to have resources that have the required skills to perform a successful and timely migration between archives. In order to achieve the migration, resources need to have an in-depth understanding of the existing archiving solution as well as the solution that the content will be migrated to. Having a partner that specialises in these migrations can assist to reduce risk, ensure compliance and simplify the process of moving content from archive product A to archive product B.

The complexity of migrations is exacerbated by the huge volumes of data that exist within archiving solutions, typically generated over a number of years. The platforms themselves may also not have been adequately maintained and may not be performing well, which makes the migration more difficult to achieve.

When companies do attempt to conduct their own archive-to-archive migrations, the process typically needs to be completed manually, which can end up taking years to complete. During this time it is all too easy to lose track of what data has been migrated and what has not, and there is no way of checking this with a manual migration. Using native migration tools can also prove difficult, as failure to migrate data is not reported on. During an archive-to-archive migration it is essential to ensure that the chain of custody is not compromised – in other words that during the process of the migration the integrity of the data was not compromised at all, which is practically impossible without some form of reporting.

A successful migration should be as seamless as possible for users, and should take place in the back end until such time as cutover occurs. Users should also have as few disruptions as possible and should be able to access all legacy information throughout the process. Compliance with eDiscovery requirements such as chain of custody should be met before, during and after the migration and the migration should be fast and direct across multiple platforms. These many challenges serve to highlight the requirement to have access to a partner with expertise, skill and experience in a number of archiving platforms, and to make use of specialised tools that have been designed to simplify these archive migrations.

The reality is that the skills pool around archiving migrations is very limited, not simply in South Africa but across the globe. The required skills across the many different platforms, technologies and vendor solutions are not common, as most service providers focus on single vendor solutions. Ensuring a successful archive-to-archive migration across platforms requires the services of an experienced multi-vendor service provider with knowledge and understanding of multiple Archive vendor solutions.  Service providers should also specialise in core systems such as those provided by Microsoft, IBM, Zimbra and others, and have access to a variety of tools to assist with the migration.

From both a risk and time perspective, it pays hugely to partner with a service provider that has experience with cross-platform messaging and archiving migrations, ensuring that migrations are completed quickly, effectively and with full compliance and audit trails in place.

VISIT OUR WEBSITE FOR MORE INFORMATION: www.soarsoft.co.za

Editorial contacts:

Soarsoft Africa
Chris Hathaway
Director
Tel: 021 200 2393
Email: chrish@soarsoft.co.za

Evolution PR
Lesley Rencontre
Tel: 011-462 0679
Email: Lesley@evolutionpr.co.za