Reduce the Time, Effort, and Risk That Come with a Migration to the Cloud

Insights February 21, 2023
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Everybody knows about the cost savings and more efficient work model organizations can achieve by migrating local on-premises shared data to the cloud – especially with the increases in remote workforces. The cloud provides employees with flexible access to their SaaS applications – and the mission-critical data within – regardless of where they are.

So, cloud is great – once you’re there. Getting there, on the other hand – migrating that data or the workloads – is typically an arduous, tedious, and expensive process with room for mistakes. IT administrators often need help in identifying the right assets to migrate and the best way to get them migrated. Because of this, organizations often seek a partner who has migrated other organizations multiple times before. That shifts the challenge to selecting the right partner, but a challenge remains

At Veritas, we’ve seen that the majority of our customers looking to migrate to the cloud (for example, moving from on-premises Office 365 to the SaaS-based Microsoft 365) usually also have the on-premises servers deployed at multiple locations, and also have a significant amount of data on file server – also likely at multiple locations. The migration from Office 365 to Microsoft 365 – and the migration from on-premises file servers to cloud-based archiving – can be complex, can take a long time, and can lead to potential overage charges from the SaaS application providers, potentially costing organizations thousands of dollars.

One element that is often overlooked is the shared responsibility model that Microsoft and other SaaS and PaaS providers operate under. Using Microsoft 365 as the example, in the shared responsibility model, Microsoft is responsible for the application software and the infrastructure on which it runs. At all levels it is the customer – and only the customer – who is responsible for the security and protection of their data.

While the terms “security” and “protection” can sound like they’re the same thing, in this usage they’re related but separate. Data security refers to preventing outsiders from accessing your data. Data protection refers to preventing your data from being lost, whether due to application or infrastructure failure, accidental (or malicious) deletion, or ransomware.

Because of this model, customers planning a migration should also be ensuring that they’ll have a data protection solution for their SaaS application and PaaS platform data. Because of this, many organizations have planned to move all their data from Office 365 to Microsoft 365, and then will perform a second data migration of the data from Microsoft 365 to their cloud backup.

With Veritas AltaTM SaaS Protection, you can significantly reduce the time and effort required to migrate on-premises Office 365 data and deployments to the cloud while ensuring it is protects, available, searchable for eDiscovery, and to meet regulatory compliance requirements – in a single migration rather than the two described above. This gives customers obvious time and cost savings. For many organizations, the time saved is as – if not more – important than the money saved. We can help provide savings in both.

Veritas Alta SaaS Protection will simply back up your on-premises Office 365 data directly to the cloud and – at your option – also delete the data from the source locations. Veritas Alta SaaS Protection writes all data in ingests to immutable WORM storage in the cloud and indexes it for fast search results. The data remains accessible by administrators and users.

By moving the data directly into our backup solution, we eliminate the need for a second migration – as soon as your migration completes, you’ll have a full backup copy of all of it already. The data in Veritas Alta SaaS Protection can also have data retention and data location policies applied upon ingestion, enforcing your compliance policies.

To make things even better, Veritas Alta SaaS Protection can also provide migration for all your unstructured file data as well, just as simply and with the same results.

For organizations making the move from on-premises to the cloud who will also require Microsoft 365 backup (everyone moving to Microsoft 365 needs this), Veritas Alta SaaS Protection can help you reduce time, effort, money, and risk, all while keeping you data accessible for your users, indexing it for searches, applying your compliance policies, while making eDiscovery and meeting your regulatory compliance requirements easy. All this in a single migration with moving your existing data into Microsoft 365 unnecessary.

If you’d like to learn more about how Veritas Alta SaaS Protection can help reduce your on-premises footprint while providing access to users and storage in the cloud, read our solution brief on this topic or contact us today for further discussion or a demo.

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Dave Henry
Product Marketing Manager, Veritas Alta SaaS Protection