Success Story: Otto Group IT migrate 30 TB of Enterprise Vault archive data to Office 365 with Quadrotech

30 TB | ~50,000 STAFF | ENTERPRISE VAULT TO MICROSOFT OFFICE 365

Industry: Retail
Headquarters: Hamburg, Germany
Company Size: part of the Otto Group with over 50,000 employees in more than 30 countries
Website: https://www.ottogroup.com/

Founded in Germany in 1949, today the Otto Group is a globally active retail and services group with around 52,560 employees in 30 major company groups and does business in over 30 countries in Europe, North and South America, and Asia.

Its business activities are grouped into three segments: Multichannel Retail, Financial Services, and Service. In the 2018/19 financial year, the Otto Group generated revenues of 13.4 billion euros. With online revenues of approximately 7.7 billion euros, the Otto Group is one of the world’s largest online retailers. Otto Group IT delivers innovative and efficient fit-for-purpose IT solutions helping the Otto Group to push the limits.

Challenges

• Struggles with native tools
• Customer required calendars to be excluded from migration
• Some users post-migration started to receive unread notifications, which was an Enterprise Vault issue. Quadrotech worked with the customer to resolve this by configuring a mail rule in Office 365 which blocked these items from being sent

Susanne Webel, the Senior Project Manager for the Workplace Services Division at Otto Group IT in Hamburg said:

“When the decision was made to migrate user data (i.e. mailboxes) to the cloud we also decided to discontinue our archiving solution and move the data back to the user’s mailboxes. In order to save time, money (and On-Premises storage space) we decided to migrate the archived mail objects directly to the cloud using a third-party tool – Quadrotech’s Archive Shuttle made the best impression when comparing different vendors.”

Prior to working with Quadrotech, Otto Group IT did a test migration from Enterprise Vault – they exported some PST Files and imported them into Microsoft Office 365. This was the first step they took since they wanted to test native migration capabilities. There were many challenges with using the native tools for migrations, including legal and compliance aspects involved with doing it manually.

Ensuring chain of custody and fidelity of every message is in fact, a main goal of the migration – not to incur heavy risks for the business, since native migrations provide no means to confirm that items in the source successfully made it to the target unchanged. Otto Group IT then looked for third-party vendors to migrate Enterprise Vault archives to Office 365 seamlessly and without doing anything on their end, as they were managed post-migration.

Solution

• 30TB Enterprise Vault to Office 365 (primary mailbox)
• Fully Managed Migration Solution from Quadrotech

“We used Archive Shuttle in order to migrate our On-Premises mail archives to the cloud. We chose Quadrotech because during the RFP process Quadrotech appeared to us to be the vendor with the most experience in Office 365 migration scenarios and also the one with the best service offerings.” explains Susanne.

Otto Group IT ultimately chose Managed Migration services from a third-party vendor, otherwise it would’ve taken months, maybe years to manually migrate PST files to Office 365, and they simply didn’t have the tools nor the internal resources to achieve this. Managed migration proved to be a perfect fit for their situation, and also freed up time and resources so that employees could concentrate on their daily tasks.

Mapping Statistics:

Quadrotech did routine daily checks to monitor the migration and sent Otto Group IT weekly updates. Here is an example of weekly statistics from a managed migration project:

Benefits

• All data now resides in a single location and is accessible 24/7
• Once the migration is completed, the on-premises Enterprise Vault environment can be decommissioned as well as associated storage
• Reduction in a costly 3rd party support agreement with Veritas

“Quadrotech’s tools and the managed service that is part of Quadrotech offerings simply saved a whole lot of effort and time, that could be invested in other technical challenges and aspects of the Office 365 migration,” says Webel.

“For us this was a fairly simple calculation that definitely paid off. Archive migration happened very smooth and fast and with minimal impact for the users. I’m sure that other organizations can equally profit from Quadrotech’s tools and services.”

– Susanne Webel, Senior Project Manager for Workplace Services Division