Cloud Storage Migration Challenges for Enterprises

Gone are the days when we only had fewer choices when it comes to choosing a cloud storage and collaboration platform for businesses. We now have tens, if not, hundreds of cloud service providers that offer storage and collaboration solutions tailor-made for business needs.

Leading enterprise content management platforms like Dropbox, OneDrive, Box, Google Team Drive, and SharePoint have revolutionized the way people connect, communicate, and collaborate at work. They are not only inexpensive but also easy to configure and use; especially when compared to legacy ECM (enterprise content management), EFSS (enterprise file synchronization and sharing), and DMS (document management system) platforms.

The sharp rise in the number of cloud services has allowed SMBs and SMEs to select one that suits their storage and collaboration needs perfectly. The intense competition between the leading cloud service providers has benefitted users in the form of incentives, attractive pricing, and innovative features.

As a result, hundreds and thousands of businesses around the world, irrespective of their size, are migrating from legacy ECM platforms to cloud as well as from one clout to another.

Cloud Storage Migration Challenges
While the idea of migrating from one cloud to another does sound appealing for many contemporary businesses, a lot of them would often step back from executing the migration project, assuming that it can be a complex and time-taking IT task. This e-book discusses the possible migration challenges IT admins and professionals often face while attempting to migrate from one cloud service to another.

1. Platform Complexities
Most enterprise content management platforms are easy to use but hard to manage. They are complex, with no global standard rules for managing file conventions such as their name and length requirements, permissions at the user and group levels, sharing, visibility, access levels, document versioning, and extended metadata. The above data is critical for maintaining an organization’s data and ensuring secure collaboration and smooth flow of data between parties.

Since the source and destination ECMs usually have varied rules and design environments, an IT administrator must make sure that file conventions, folder structure, sharing, and permissions remain accurate and intact during migration. Once lost, the IT team may need to spend a lot of time recovering metadata, file permissions, etc. It will then not only waste thousands of precious work hours but also increase the risk of data corruption and loss.

2. File Name Complexities
Certain cloud collaboration and storage platforms don’t allow some characters to present in the files names. Since collaboration platforms don’t follow a global standard when it comes to the allowing or disallowing some characters in file names, some files may never be transferred to an exact location in the destination cloud.

3. Permissions
Migrating permissions is the most critical part of a cloud storage migration project. Unlike single user cloud storage platforms, enterprise content management systems have complex file sharing and access permissions between multiple users. Permission migration is one of the biggest roadblocks for manual migration. The complexity often discourages businesses from switching to a new cloud service provider, especially those who don’t wish to use a migration software.

4. Network and Bandwidth Limitations
Migrating a few users and gigabytes of data may not be a challenging task for most IT teams. The real problem comes in when hundreds of users and terabytes of data needs to be migrated. Generally, internet connectivity in a typical work environment doesn’t let an IT administrator migrates large data. Such attempt would not only increase an organization’s internet overhead but also disrupts the team with latency issues.

5. Rate Limitations
Most cloud service providers enforce upload rate limits to protect their networks and ensuring high availability and consistent performance to their users. Each service provider their upload thresholds and continuously hitting the provider’s thresholds can cause serious upload delays. Some file transfers may fail altogether, causing serious complications to the migration project.

6. User Adoption Challenges
User adoption is one of the biggest post migration challenges that businesses usually face. Despite extensive training, some employees within an organization may resist using the new platform. It is advised that businesses don’t decommission legacy platforms abruptly. The ideal way of overcoming user adoption challenges is to provide early access to users weeks before the migration is initiated.