The Issue
The client was equipped with the legacy server, which was about to crash. This was because the data flood was beyond their capacity. It ultimately overwhelmed their old disks. The situation was such that they need to move the files on a very urgent basis before they get lost. If the server crashes, they might lose out on critical data. The client previously-stored all their data, documents, and files on a local file server. However, they desired to move to a modern cloud collaborative tool and therefore chose to migrate the file server to SharePoint.
Bottlenecks in Using On-Premises
1. Maintenance
Since the client stored files on-premises, it involved a considerable upfront cost of owning and managing the physical device. The data grows every day, and they needed to make an upfront investment without navigating the actual need for data size. These are the critical equipment that needs to be running up and down seamlessly. They were also enabling the warranties for maintaining the servers and other critical physical hardware.
2. Cost
Firstly, the disks and the servers required a separate room, eating up a considerable chunk of real estate. Here, they would need to maintain a proper room temperature for the devices, making air conditioners running 24 by 7 inevitable. And not to mention the fire and smoke sensors which ensure a robust mechanism to alert the team in case of contingencies. Suppose there is heat or an increase in the temperature, the same need to be warned to the office admin or the network admin.
The initial upfront cost of purchasing the hardware could be anywhere between $10,000 to $15,000. Also, the servers require the renewing of warranties which costs somewhere around $2000 per annum. Now, add up the cost of hiring a dedicated resource responsible for maintaining the hardware on-premises.
We can go with a rough estimate thereof somewhere around $5000 per month. In all, the client was spending around $7000 – $8000 a year in maintaining the data, and that too by running the risk.
Client Requirements
The client needed a highly secure solution with the capacity to handle permissions and security systems. In the age of cloud computing, it appeared that using SharePoint Online as a file server was the best option. The client also requested a customized SharePoint managed services in which only necessary files and directories were transferred to SharePoint with the appropriate permission levels and user access. Additionally, the client desired a unified user interface, ease of navigation, and customized document management.
With this one-of-a-kind necessity, our SharePoint migration consultants were tasked with selecting the appropriate SharePoint file server migration software and configuring them, without which a stable and efficient migration would be impossible.
The Challenge
The biggest challenge our experts face In Moreover, another reason why they This made the project more challenging for us. The time limit to migrate the files was 48 hours. Though the project was not a big one, we had a time constraint to deal with. To make the project more efficient and agile, we ensured that a dedicated senior project manager and one junior project manager migrated the data seamlessly to SharePoint.
Another challenge was to ensure placing the robust IT infrastructure in place with the Microsoft 365 services. For this, we provided a dedicated, Microsoft Certified expert who confirmed that all the necessary permissions are set before handing over the data to the client.
Solution
Since Microsoft SharePoint Online is a viable alternative to on-premises storage arrays, the client desired to migrate selected files to the server with the necessary permission levels and user access while keeping in mind the SharePoint threshold cap.
The client’s on-premises file system housed mission-critical data that needed to be transferred to the Office 365 cloud. However, the server contained some legacy records and dead data that the client wanted to have on-premises.
Third-party platforms were used for seamless and on-time project delivery. For migrations into SharePoint, the team at Computer Solutions East decided on a prior migration strategy and proceeded with the implementation by following these three steps:
– Choosing the correct file-sharing method – ShareGate and Scale.
– Assessing the file server and ShareGate to determine the data sophistication and how to resolve such complexities creatively.
– Migrating the necessary SharePoint Online folders with the permissions that were required.
Benefits Availed
They got into Microsoft 365 SharePoint initially, which provides them with one terabyte of storage. Since they had just 42 GB of files that were to be migrated, they did not have to purchase anything extra in terms of file storage as they can avail 1TB of space with any number of licenses. We offered them three licenses for the three users who would be using the SharePoint services to access the file.
The cost of licenses was around $150/user for a month, which includes all the SharePoint Business Standard License services. Another plus side is that there is no maintenance fee. They can simply renew the license and make further investments only when they need to expand hard disk storage. The entire project cost, including the 10-hour migration, did not cost them more than $2000. This means they were able to drive cost efficiencies by 400%.
They would only need to buy more storage once they reach the threshold of 1TB. In such a case, we would help them with the extra storage space. Instead of buying large data spaces when using on-premises, SharePoint provided them with flexible upgrades where they can avail of 1 GB for 20cents per month.
With Microsoft 365 business, they can leverage everything using their office application suite. The entire cloud suite can host their emails, the Cloud SharePoint one drive, Microsoft Teams, and many more without incurring any additional costs.
