Five Things to Take Care of Before Migrating a G Suite Account
Thinking about migrating a G Suite account? Migrating data from one system to another can be tedious, labor intensive, and in some cases, even risky. Ultimately, data migration is involved in IT operations. In today’s cloud SaaS environments, there are times when your organization may need to migrate data between cloud user accounts or even dissimilar cloud SaaS environments.
When it comes to Google G Suite, data may need to be migrated for a number of reasons. When migrating cloud data, it is extremely important to prepare for any move of data carefully. In this post, we will consider five things to take care of before migrating a G Suite account and why these are important.
What is a data migration and why migrate G Suite accounts?
First of all, what is data migration? In general terms, data migration is when you take the data that exists in one system or account and move or copy that data into another system or account. In the case of a G Suite account, this might be migrating the data in one user’s account such as Gmail, Google Drive files, Calendar, and move this data into another user’s account.
This type of data migration could take place both “within” the same G Suite organization, “between” one G Suite organization and another G Suite organization, or migrating the G Suite account to another cloud provider altogether. Why might your organization need to perform a data migration of a G Suite account?
There are a number of reasons that may come up for data migration of your G Suite account. These may include the following:
An employee leaves the company
When an employee leaves, they may hold data in their account that is business-critical. Migrating the data to an alternate G Suite account preserves access and allows recycling and reclaiming the G Suite user license.
Your organization may manage multiple G Suite environments
Due to mergers, acquisitions, or other business decisions, there may be a need to migrate data between different G Suite organizations.
Your organization may decide to use a different cloud service provider
If your organization is currently using G Suite, there may be business decisions made that lead to migrating G Suite user accounts to another cloud service provider such as Office 365.
Whatever, the case, migrating data from a G Suite account requires careful forethought before proceeding forward with migrating your data. What steps do you need to take care of before migrating a G Suite account?
Five Things to take care of before migrating a G Suite account
Proper planning and forethought can help you to avoid common mistakes when migrating data. It can also help to ensure the process is as seamless and painless as possible. Let’s take a look at the following five things to take care of before migrating a G Suite account.
- Discover and decide what data needs migrated
- Purchase and setup target accounts
- Decide on a timeline for the migration
- Determine who will perform the migration
- Identify the tools that will be used for the migration
1. Discover and decide what data needs to be migrated
One of the first critical steps that your organization must take before migrating your G Suite account is to discover and decide what data needs to be migrated. While one would assume this is a basic requirement, often organizations may not have a good understanding of what data is in use by a particular G Suite user account or across the G Suite organization in general.
Whether it is a single G Suite user, multiple users, or your entire G Suite organization, having a feel for exactly which apps contain data that would need to be migrated is essential before carrying out any migration task. Additionally, is it necessary to migrate all data from your G Suite user? This is an important question to ask.
There may only be a certain subset of the G Suite user data that needs to be migrated. Identifying this before actually migrating is a required step to ensure the business-critical data that is needed is the data that is actually migrated.
2. Purchase and setup target accounts
One of the necessary steps that you must have in place before migrating your G Suite user to another G Suite user or otherwise is you must purchase and setup target accounts that will be the target of the data migration. Obviously, before migrating any data, you want to make sure you have all the details completed with the target user account.
This would include having the user account created, services assigned, and any licensing assigned that would be needed for the user to have access to the services needed to receive the migrated data. When thinking about migrating a user account within the same G Suite organization, licenses can be reclaimed and recycled from the user account that is the source of the migration.
Migrating data between your G Suite users, especially when employees leave your organization for one reason or another, is essential to maintaining efficient licensing costs and preventing cloud SaaS license sprawl simply to keep business-critical data accessible in accounts that are no longer used by an active employee.
3. Decide on a timeline for the migration
Before you migrate data from your G Suite user account, you need to decide on a timeline for the migration process. This will help to keep all business stakeholders and end users whom the migration may affect, aware of the time period that will be required before data may become available to the end users who require access.
There are many factors that may impact the timeline for migrating your G Suite user account data. Questions that will need to be asked may include:
- How much data will be migrated?
- Will all data need to be migrated?
- Will the migration target a user in the same G Suite organization?
- Will the migration target a different cloud service provider SaaS environment altogether?
4. Determine who will perform the migration
An important decision that will need to be taken care of before the actual data migration is to determine who will actually perform the migration. Will this operation be carried out by your own IT administrators? For many organizations, cloud data migration may not be a task that IT administrators carry out on a daily basis. This can lead to longer timelines for data migration or even difficulties with the migration of data itself.
It will need to be decided if the expertise exists in-house to carry out the data migration of your G Suite user account or if a third-party consultant or service provider may be utilized to take the lead in the migration of your data. This may also be determined by how much data is to be migrated and whether or not the data will remain within the same G Suite organization or be migrated to a different cloud SaaS environment altogether.
The complexity and number of tasks involved can certainly be affected by the target of the data migration and if multiple cloud providers are involved. As an example, G Suite to G Suite tends to be less complicated than G Suite to Office 365.
5. Identify the tools that will be used for the migration
An extremely important task to take care of before migrating your G Suite account data is to settle on the tools that will be used for migrating your G Suite data. Google provides native tooling for performing data migration such as the Google Data Migration Service.
However, there are limitations to note about the data migration service including the following:
- It can only migrate data from a single-source server to G Suite
- It is limited to a maximum of 100 users or less
- It can only migrate data from Email, Calendars, and Contacts.
- While it can migrate data from Email, Calendars, and Contacts, you cannot migrate the data from these at the same time.
While native tools like the Data Migration Service is a native tool and freely available to use with a supported subscription of G Suite, the limitations need to be noted. The limitations listed above may create huge roadblocks to migrating the business-critical data you need as well as doing that in a timely manner.
Using third-party tools often provides a much easier, streamlined, and simpler process to migrate important G Suite data. Many of the advantages afforded by using a third-party solution include:
- Much wider coverage of G Suite services than native tools
- Allows parallel migration of data
- Can often migrate between G Suite accounts or even between G Suite and another cloud SaaS environment.
Is there a recommended third-party tool that can help you easily migrate your G Suite account data?
Migrate G Suite Accounts using SpinOne SpinBackup
SpinBackup is an all-in-one backup and data migration solution as part of the SpinOne suite of products. It provides enterprise-grade Google cloud backup and restore capabilities and it allows easily migrating your G Suite data safely and securely.
Using SpinBackup, you have a G Suite migration tool that allows migrating your data within the same G Suite domain or different G Suite environments. It provides the following capabilities for G Suite migration:
- Data is encrypted and secured both in-flight and at-rest
- G Suite data can be restored granularly as single files or in bulk
- Unlike many of the Google native solutions for exporting and reimporting data, with SpinBackup there is no need to export the data into a useable format before the data can be migrated to a different G Suite account
- SpinBackup allows migrating all your G Suite data and not simply Email, Calendar, and Contacts.
- Data migration of multiple G Suite users can be initiated simultaneously so that your data migration can happen as quickly as possible.
In addition to the data migration capabilities provided by SpinBackup, SpinOne provides world class cybersecurity protection for your G Suite environment. This includes AI-driven ransomware protection.