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Check your cloud storage vendor escape route

Are you being locked in by your cloud vendor?

Whenever I get on a flight I always count the number of rows to the nearest exit, so I can grope my way out of a smoke-filled cabin if the worst should happen.  A totally pointless exercise, as in reality I’d be toast, but at least it makes me feel better.

What is worth doing is checking your exit route if you’re planning to store your content in a hosted cloud service.

A common tale of woe relates to hosted email journaling vendors, whose built-in export tools are simply not up to the job of wholesale extraction when the customer wants to ‘move on’.

“It took us between 16 hours to a day to extract just one mailbox into a PST, which then needed to be re-imported.”

“We had to run a series of searches using the “from address” to collect all the emails belonging to each user.”

By all accounts, data extraction is not a fun exercise when you’ve got TBs of data to move.

Check your exit route

What’s involved in getting your data back out of the cloud has to be a primary consideration if you are planning to migrate into it.

Ask your prospective cloud vendor these questions:

  1. How easy will it be to get my data out,
  2. How quickly can I get at it? Will it be over the network or on a disk?
  3. What about chain-of-custody during the extraction process?
  4. How will I know I’ve got everything back?
  5. What format will it be in when I get it back?
  6. How much will it cost?

Cloud storage vendor escape route

If you’re stuck in a hosted journal service, or are contemplating your best options for zero lock-in cloud storage, get in touch!.