I’ve written before about how cloud vendors can capriciously change their policies and pricing and how lock-in can arise out of cloud reliance. Once you’re fully invested (and therefore fully reliant) on the cloud, this can be a real problem. But just because the cloud can be a somewhat challenging place when it comes to lock-in and switching costs, that doesn’t mean you have to be locked in. This article shows you our pick of services that can help you fight lock-in and switch to other providers.
Messaging migration the Google and Microsoft way
We’re going to kick off our cloud migration “best-ofs” with the services that Google and Microsoft each offer to assimilate customers from their competitors. Google has a tool to pull in Microsoft users. Microsoft has a tool to pull in Google customers. Neither are super easy or super-convenient, but they’re part of the overall platform offering. Right after, we’ll show you a paid-for service that can do all the migration for you. But for now, let’s look at native solutions.
Services that can help with migration
In this section, we will spotlight services that can help you migrate or perform migrations for you. Generally, these services charge per user being migrated, the amount of data being moved, or both. But because you’re paying for a specific migration service, and that’s what these vendors do, you have a far better chance of getting more hand-holding and support than the solutions shown above. Pros:
Included in the cost of your Workspace planHas some support from GoogleModerately configurable
Cons:
Must run on a local client machineModerately complex to setupLimited support from Google
There are also some substantial migration limitations. Shared calendars, cloud attachments, and event colors will not be migrated. Microsoft also says that “A maximum of three email addresses per contact are migrated over, and Gmail tags, contact URLs, and custom tags will not be migrated from Google Contacts.” Additionally, attachments are limited to 35MB, although that can be adjusted to 150MB if a setting is tweaked. Pros:
A number of different approaches are offeredMultiple runs are possible
Cons:
Migration not available for Office 365 US Government GCC High or DoDAttachments limited to 150MB (after setting tweak)Migration tool doesn’t work with records management (MRM) or archival policies
Any final recommendations?
Yeah. Don’t aim for perfection. Aim for good enough. Plan ahead to know what “good enough” means for your organization. I’ve found that there are always some edge-case records that muck up the works, and trying to get every single thing perfect just isn’t practical. Be willing to manually enter or update a small number of records or delete a few that just aren’t mission-critical. All this goes to planning. Scope out what you’re dealing with, plan out how you’re going to make the move, and decide what’s important and what’s absolutely mission-critical. Don’t confuse mission-critical with just nice to have. Be patient. Be nice to the vendors. And communicate as clearly as you possibly can. Today, they move from and to a very wide range of services, shown above. The basic plans support email, calendars, contacts, tasks, archives, while their enterprise plans and professional services can also convert rooms, resources, groups, distribution lists, delegation, aliases, other active directory attributes. Pros:
Very wide range of conversion sources and targetsLots of experience
Cons:
Some advanced conversions require enterprise or professional services plansThe lowest cost plan requires end-user authentication per mailbox
Because Awesome Support was relatively small compared to the mainstream cloud help desk companies, I didn’t expect to be able to migrate all my tickets. Then I found help-desk-migration. Not only did they do the migration, but they were helpful along the way. Pros:
I had a very successful migrationA ton of platforms supportedGood, highly responsive support
Cons:
Wish they supported other types of SaaS software beyond help desk
Pros:
A huge number of CRM platforms supportedOffers additional backup and export services
Cons:
No pricing published on the websiteTest size is only 10 items
Do you download everything and then upload it again? If you have a few gigabytes of storage, it’s no big thing. But it can become problematic when you start to push into the terabyte range (I have something like 27TB in cloud storage). Downloads might not be bad, but uploads could take forever. A better solution is doing a cloud-to-cloud migration, where your data never has to return on-premises. MultiCloud offers such a service, allowing you to move files from a wide range of cloud storage providers to other cloud storage providers. Pricing is based on how much data you use per month, but the $120/year plan allows for an unlimited number of services and an unlimited amount of data. Of course, unlimited is never truly unlimited, so check their terms of service for any gotchas. Pros:
The $120/mo unlimited plan is aggressive and powerfulService supports scheduling and filteringSupports non-public cloud through FTP
Cons:
It would be nice if public cloud vendors including some of these featuresUsers report some transfers get “stuck"No mobile app
My reasoning is that a company that can convert from a lot of CRMs to a lot of CRMs will understand the generalized data structure for a CRM. Likewise, for help desks. This means that as they move data, they have to build mechanisms for application migration with context, not just a set of field transfers. Also, with one exception (Trujay), I avoided listing any vendors who don’t publish prices. I included Trujay because no other vendor supported the wealth of CRM platforms they did. So what about you? Have you migrated cloud data? Have you been stuck on a cloud provider? Let us know in the comments below. See also:
The cloud calculation: Factor these lock-in and switching costs into your cloud plansA terabyte too tight? Small businesses, beware the cloud storage ceiling
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