5 Game-Changing Cloud Migration Tips

Migrating documents to the cloud can be a complex project and, if done incorrectly, can set your business up for failure. Here are five tips to help ensure that your organization will thrive instead.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

Join the conversation and share your thoughts, or contact us if you have questions about document compression project.