When you are deciding on a content migration tool to migrate data into the likes of Google Drive, SharePoint, Dropbox or even block storage you need to consider the requirements of the tools and what is actually required before you can consider migrating a single file or user. A lot of tools require you to host their software within cloud infrastructure such a GCP, or Azure which induces further costs on top of the licensing cost you’re already paying for. This also adds additional support complexity and creates barriers when it comes to migrating data.
Considering we’re in a cloud era where infrastructure is scalable and dreams are endless, gone are the days where you have to manually spin up your own servers and run infrastructure to complete a task. Often software that requires you to do this was built pre-cloud and doesn’t scale very well or play nicely with regards to scale.
When it comes to managing someone else’s software or infrastructure there are key points you have to take into account. The cost of data transfer, it’s all well in all paying for the license to migrate the data, often $1/GB or $10/User (that includes 10GB), however you do have to take into account the cost of data transfer. Providers such as Amazon, Azure and GCP prices range from 0.09 cents per GB up to 0.14 cents. If you’re looking to migrate 5TB, this adds an additional $450 — $700 on top of the $5000 for the license to migrate.
Additionally, when hosting your own data infrastructure you also have to pay for the compute nodes to actually serve the migration. Depending on compute size, how many you’re running and the time it takes to migrate, this price can easily add up to cost you more in the migration. As mentioned before, the software you are running is not built optimally for the cloud, and due to this the time it takes to migrate even 5TB can be costly.
The other hidden cost that is often forgotten is time. The time it takes engineers to configure the environment ready to migrate, then the time in setting up the migration, implementing licenses and looking at how they can fix faults should any arise, when you add an engineers billable time to managing infrastructure, it really just puts more icing on the cake with regards to the cost to migrate.
When managing other companies software, there is often things that crop up and delay or slow down the ability to move forward. In some cases this could even be a Windows update due to the way the product has been built and what it runs on. Windows updates unfortunately can hinder the migration and at times cause it to be started all over again.
Overall managing infrastructure for data migrations, regardless if it is 100GB or 300TB, adds additional overhead, cost and complexity that shouldn’t be an issue, especially in 2021. When using Movebot there are no additional overheads, the cost per GB remains and you aren’t paying for additional licenses, hosting costs or worrying about a Windows update failing your migration. Movebot has been built in a scalable, automated and containerized manner like all modern SaaS platforms where all you need to do, is connect source, destination, map users and click go. The Movebot team will handle the rest and be available to assist if required.
Due to the way Movebot has been built, there is also the ability to easily push 6–20TB a day into the likes of Google Drive and have migrations run seamlessly and easily, and it only takes 5–10 minutes to have the migration configured and running. Even if you have any failed files, you don’t need to re-run the entire migration, you can simply just re-run those failed files to ensure the migration keeps moving forward.
If you’re looking to migrate to Google Drive, or if you are planning your migration head to Movebot and see how both the team and the tool can help you. For a detailed guide on migrating to Google Drive head to Movebot’s knowledge base.
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Originally published at https://www.movebot.io.
