The migration of PST data is a valuable undertaking to reduce litigation risk, to safeguard data from content corruption common in older and large PST files and to minimise data loss as PST files are not commonly part of company’s corporate data protection strategy. Yet, from an operational perspective, the process can have an extended impact, because it touches elements throughout the IT infrastructure including network bandwidth, Exchange Servers, storage, firewalls, home office users, branch offices and more.
“PST migration projects are a very serious undertaking,” said Dave Hunt, CEO of C2C. “The risks are high, and the consequences of error can be massive – including loss of email data on a large scale or perceived wanton destruction of emails. As such, it is critical to follow best practices for any PST migration or elimination project and ensure that the solution you are using adequately scales for the size of your environment.”
To avoid costly errors, consider the following best practices when performing any PST migration or elimination project:
· Assess the situation: Before you start a project, try to understand the scale and complexity you are faced with. Once started, review your findings and criteria at regular intervals.
· Assess Client Impact: It’s important to understand the type of client deployment requirements of your selected solution. Using Windows WMI and administrative shares, or Group Policy may be limiting or have more impact on your end users than you desire. Even better are solutions that simply run in memory and can be initiated automatically by a login script or manually by a desktop shortcut or start menu entry.
· Understand the Scope: Once clients have been deployed, ensure that you have complete information on the scope of the PST challenge. This means learning more than the “size on disk” of your PST files. Understanding the size of data, number of PSTs, and volume of PST data by user are also critical to the project’s scope.
· Reduce the Scope: After a full scope evaluation, it may be apparent that not all PST data should be migrated. It is easier, faster and more cost effective to delete data in place rather than migrate it into Exchange only to delete it later. Eliminate any PST data that falls outside your corporate retention policy before you perform your migration.
· Bandwidth / Network Implications: When setting up the migration plan, know the impact the data movement may have on network bandwidth. You may need more than a solution that can schedule migrations during certain times. Have access to detailed “throttling” controls will help you minimise LAN, WAN and branch office links so your migration doesn’t impact other critical business operations.
· End User Experience: No solution you use for PST migration should impact your end user productivity. Your solution should not be visible to the end user, nor should it require any manual intervention to complete the migration process.
· Accommodate Coupled and Uncoupled PST Files: PST files fall into two categories, files that are actively in use by an Exchange mailbox, and files that have been “uncoupled” and are simply stored on disk, not in use. It’s important that your PST migration solution can capture data transparently from PST files that are open and in use, without creating an error message. It is also important that your PST migration solution search for, find and assign ownership for uncoupled PST files that need to be migrated into a central archive.
· Scalability: True scalability for a PST migration should mean that the process can be performed as automatically as possible, with minimal user or IT intervention. Solutions that require manual client installation, manual configuration and frequent administrator interaction will impede your PST migration project and have a potentially negative impact on end users.
C2C’s PST Enterprise™ solution is a strategic software tool which allows organisations to manage the elimination and migration of Microsoft Exchange PST data throughout their entire network. PST Enterprise supports a range of actions once PST files have been discovered to help email administrators best manage PST data for simplified administration, eDiscovery and overall corporate data protection. The C2C PST Enterprise solution operates as a stand-alone product which can be used alongside existing email archive software products or in combination with the C2C ArchiveOne Enterprise email management, eDiscovery and retention solution.
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Tags: Compliance, Tiered Storage |
