- July 9, 2020
- FOXITBLOG
Migrations are a great opportunity to improve business efficiency, reduce risk while mitigating costs as you transition to the cloud. Here are a few tips that can help:
1. Don’t “lift and shift”
A lot of organizations appear to be embracing this approach as it seems easier. However, in the end, you have a “garbage in garbage out” situation can damage the experience with the new cloud-based environment.
- Tip: Consider cleaning up as part of your migration project so that you only bring along what you need and want. It will reduce the total cost to keep your content in the cloud as well. There are a number of vendors out there that offer analytics tools that can help assess what you currently have.
2. Leverage retention management
Without control and governance over your documents, organizations often create massive numbers of files which can become costly to store while also causing a risk to the organization as old content can become a liability.
- Tip: Leverage retention management throughout your organization to automatically remove old content that can be deleted based on retention policies that align with regulatory requirements.
3. Speed up your migration
It can take days (and at times, weeks) to move terabytes of documents from your old on-premise systems to a new, cloud-based environment. This can be costly and often causes painful transition processes, as users can’t update either the old or the new systems.
- Tip: Leverage advanced document compression to reduce the total amount of content that needs to be migrated. In many cases, your image-based document storage can be reduced by 80% or more while converting documents to industry standard PDF files.
4. Add intelligence to reduce liability
Many document formats cannot be fully searched, which can put your organization at risk of missing critical information when making business decisions.
- Tip: Convert documents to searchable PDF as part of your migration. This applies to both born digital formats such as Office, Email or HTML that may have embedded images; as well as image formats such as TIFF or JPG.
5. Normalize content to ensure compatibility
It can seem appealing to store documents in their original file format, but this may actually put your organization at risk of a variety of issues. These include file format compatibility problems, and inadvertent importation of viruses or documents with active content.
- Tip: Standardize your documents to PDF/A as part of your migration to ensure compatibility, as well as prevent viruses and active content from entering your cloud-based systems.
6. Improve business efficiency
Once you have migrated to the cloud, all users will be remote, which can significantly impact business efficiency as document transfer and open times will be slower than with your original on-premise system.
- Tip: Consider document compression here as well, as smaller files will transfer much faster than their original file size and can substantially improve user experience and business efficiency for knowledge workers.
7. Reduce cloud costs
Many cloud environments charge for storage, making them more and more expensive over time as your organization accumulates more content. In addition, be aware of “egress” charges, which many vendors collect to access your content. These can be unpredictable as system usage changes, and therefore put your organization at risk of budget overruns.
- Tip: Leverage document compression to not only speed up your migration to the cloud, but also to help reduce cloud storage and egress charges.