Email Migration Challenges and Solutions for Businesses

Is your company upgrading from the current email platform or in the midst of an M&A (Merger or Acquisition) that requires your company to move to a different email service provider? Whatever the case, there are several email migration challenges that can create friction for your organization in performing the email migration smoothly.

In this post, explore some of the common email migration challenges and the ways to overcome them effectively.

Common Email Migration Challenges and Solutions

Migrating between email systems often comes with several challenges across various fronts, such as technical challenges, process-related challenges, legal/commercial-related policy challenges, and more.

Here is a list of some common email migration challenges organizations face and the solutions to overcome them.

Incompatibility With Source & Destination Email Platforms

Challenge: There are email migration scenarios where the migration tool may be incompatible with either the source or the destination cloud, or both. For example, the email migration tool may not support the authentication processes or API calls of either Gmail or Outlook for Gmail to Outlook migration.

Solution: Your company must choose a robust email migration tool that is compatible with your source and destination email platforms. This eliminates the roadblocks to migration due to differences in both the clouds and ensures a smooth migration.

Inability to Maintain Email Properties

Challenge: Failing to preserve email properties like sender, receiver, time, date, etc., is one of the biggest email migration challenges. It can lead to unorganized emails that can be time-consuming to sort and arrange and make accessibility difficult.

Solution: Your shortlisted email migration tool must be able to maintain the email properties to accurately replicate the original structure. It avoids confusion in the destination email cloud, enabling quicker retrieval of emails.

Limitations in Performing Delta Migration

Challenge: Whenever there are new changes in the source email platform during or after the initial migration, you must ensure that you transfer these changes to the destination. The inability to perform this delta migration will require your migration team to move the source emails all over again. This delays the migration completion and incurs additional costs for remigration.

Solution: Partner with an email migration service provider that supports single and multiple data migrations for transferring all the incremental changes. With this approach, your company can transfer only the incremental changes and save significant time, cost, and effort.

Problems in Retrieving Data Based on Custom Filters

Challenge: In some migration cases, your organization must move only selective emails based on specific filters like date, sender, attachments, receiver, etc. But if you cannot retrieve only the necessary data, your team will end up moving all the source emails, spending additional time and cost.

Solution: You can quickly transfer only the necessary emails using the custom filter feature available in some versatile email migration software. This targets only specific data for a tailored email migration.

Inability to Track Progress and Unavailability of Reports

Challenge: Without migration reports, it is problematic to identify whether all mailboxes and their properties have been migrated accurately. You will not be able to track the progress of the migration project and eventually not be proactive in preparing for the subsequent steps for a successful migration.

Solution: Utilize email migration software that provides migration reports and enables users to monitor and track the progress easily.

Inadequate Security Measures

Challenge: Business emails are one of the most sensitive and confidential data that a company must protect from threats or unauthorized access. Without sufficient security measures, your emails could be at risk of data loss or breaches, letting down your customers’ trust in your organization.

Solution: Your internal IT team must follow strict protocols to test and choose an email migration tool that passes the security and other technical functionalities checklist. Make sure the tool has proper encryption and authorization measures, complying with your regional data protection laws and standards.

No Email Backup

Challenge: Without proper email backup, your company stands at the risk of losing data during any potential migration failure. This can cost your company more than financial loss. Losing critical email data can affect the entire workflow and business operations.

Solution: Always plan for a resilient backup strategy that helps restore the email data if anything goes wrong during the migration. Leading email service providers offer solid backup and archival features to protect your data in any situation.

CloudFuze is a renowned cloud office data migration service provider that offers an efficient email migration service. Our migration professionals follow email migration best practices to avoid issues and risks and provide an error-free data transfer. You can test the functionalities of our migration tool through a POC or a pilot run and explore the features in real time.

Book a consultation with our email migration experts.