Email Archive Migration
Autotrader migrates 81 million emails from Enterprise Vault to Microsoft 365
Moving 10TB of legacy email into the cloud without compromising cost, control or data integrity
When Auto Trader moved its email environment to Microsoft’s cloud, it also needed to address a significant legacy archive estate.
The business had more than 1,600 archived mailboxes held in Enterprise Vault on-premises, representing over 10TB of data and around 81 million email records. The migration needed to support Autotrader’s wider move to Microsoft 365, while keeping costs under tight control.
The challenge
Autotrader had already taken the decision to move its email platform to Microsoft 365 as part of a wider drive to reduce infrastructure costs.
However, leaving more than 10TB of historical email in Enterprise Vault would have meant continuing to manage and maintain the legacy archive environment, undermining some of the savings the move to the cloud was intended to deliver.
At the same time, this was not a migration where Autotrader was prepared to trade reliability for cost.
With 81 million emails involved, the business wanted confidence that the migration approach could:
- extract data efficiently from Enterprise Vault
- maintain data integrity
- provide clear migration auditing
- manage failed items and retries
- minimise disruption for users
- avoid unnecessary migration of data that did not need to move
The migration therefore needed to be both cost-effective and technically robust.
Proving the migration approach before committing
Autotrader wanted to see the proposed migration technology working against its own archive environment before making a decision.
Essential therefore demonstrated the migration approach and allowed the company to test the extraction of data from its Enterprise Vault source before committing to the project.
This was particularly important because the wider project was highly cost-sensitive.
As Essential account manager explained at the time:
“Seeing the proposed solution in action was a stipulation before any deal could be agreed.”
The evaluation provided reassurance that Enterprise Vault data could be extracted in a meaningful and efficient way before the full migration began.
A controlled Enterprise Vault migration
Essential used specialist archive migration technology to move Autotrader’s legacy email from Enterprise Vault into Microsoft 365.
The approach was designed to reduce the amount of manual intervention required while maintaining visibility throughout the migration.
Key capabilities included:
- Full migration reporting and chain of custody
- Automatic retries for failed items
- Progress reporting throughout the migration
- Legacy shortcut management, helping maintain a transparent user experience after migration
- Selective migration, allowing unnecessary legacy content to be excluded
- Detailed auditing to provide confidence around data integrity
The underlying migration engine had already been used extensively by Essential on archive migration projects, allowing the team to give Autotrader the same assurances around data integrity and auditing that it would expect from a large enterprise migration.
Enterprise Vault to Microsoft 365 Migration
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