Why it's important to analyze your content before content migration

As such, spending on cloud system infrastructure services is expected to grow from $63 billion in 2020 to $81 billion by 2022.

Following the global upheaval and change that all businesses faced in 2020, more and more organizations are adopting a cloud-first approach and considering moving to modern, unified, content-services platforms that enable employees to connect, share, and govern content across their whole organization.

However, does moving to the cloud and modern content services platforms really help you improve productivity, maximize business opportunity and reduce operational costs? The answer is yes, if the migration is done right.  So how do you do it right?

When moving content to the cloud, the first and most critical step is to analyze and understand your content before you migrate it.

There are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data being generated every day – this is expected to reach 463 exabytes by 2025.  However, in our experience a significant portion of this data is Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial (ROT). So, in a well-managed environment ROT data should be deleted at best, or at the very least stored in-expensively.

With the explosion of data, to ensure a seamless migration, you need a complete data management strategy. Without a data management strategy, there is a risk that you will:

• Reduce productivity – employees will have to spend more time searching for the right content
• Reduced business efficiency – organizations will need more resources and time to back up, analyze, access, and classify the data
• Impact the decision making process – as leadership teams may be making decisions based on the ROT data rather than more enriched data
• Increase storage costs – as it costs the same amount to store ROT data as it does enriched data
• Increase security and compliance risks – as often the permissions associated with ROT files are outdated or based on obsolete file security policies. This leaves a startlingly high chance of one of them being accessible by inactive user accounts and makes them susceptible to data breaches.

Make a successful move with an AI-powered content analytics tool

Step 1: Using AI to improve findability

High quality metadata plays an important role in improving search results. However, asking employees to consistently apply useful metadata is a challenge for most organizations. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep learning (DL) however can take the strain by analyzing content and automatically adding the relevant metadata. This additional metadata can improve content-findability by adding keywords and other labels and/or descriptions.

Step 2: Using AI for Auto Classification

Data classification is an important part of an information security and compliance program as it helps define where to store sensitive and regulated data. It also helps improves business efficiency by reducing storage costs through better ROT-data management.

With AI and Machine Learning (ML), data is automatically classified based on business rules. It not only helps you organize and manage your documents smarter, faster and easier but also enables more relevant document searches and more efficient content governance - including the application of retention policies.

Step 3: Moving content to the right place to save money and improve business efficiency

After understanding your content and eliminating unneeded data, you can now decide where to move your valuable data to. Moving content to the right place can help increase business efficiency, productivity and save resources and storage costs. For example, you can:

• Move office tools to Office 365 or other EFSS tools
• Move archives to cloud storage repositories
• Move personal data to OneDrive or other EFSS solutions
• Move line of business applications related data into a chosen content services platforms, such as SharePoint Online, M-Files, Egnyte, Box, Google etc.
• Integrate your data with chosen LoB applications like Dynamics, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle ERP and many more

Moving Forward

If you need any help or expert advice on analysing your content or content migration strategy, book a free discovery session with us now.