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Little Known Facts: TDS Archive Migrations

Trusted Data Solutions has been executing Archive Mail Migrations since 2000.  Other vendors have boasted that they created the archive migration market in 2006.  Ironically, Trusted Data Solutions had six years of experience at that time.  How was TDS able to do this?  It stems from another one of their solution pillars which involves tape backup management and restoration.  In the wake of numerous email scandals, in 1999 the federal government of the United States of America enacted the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act which required Banks and financial firms retain their records including email.

A long-standing customer of Trusted Data Solutions for our tape business approached TDS regarding this newly mandated law.  With a lack of enterprise level solutions in place, this customer had created their own email archive system to comply with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Now they needed to move emails to this new archive.  The problem was that those emails were all stored on backup tapes.  TDS was able to catalog the tapes, identify the emails on them, and then connect to the proprietary archive this customer had created, and migrate the emails from tape to online archive thus facilitating full compliance with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

This was the birth of the archive business for Trusted Data Solutions.  Having been an enterprise level business, the ability to look at data on the tape side of the business allowed TDS to “deconstruct” archive database solutions such as CommVault, Barracuda, SourceOne, ZL Unified Archive and others to be able to migrate data out of archive, whether it was user or journal data. This ability to read backend data, allowed TDS to be able to utilize both the API interface provided by vendors as well as access the backend data directly.  

Do not take it for granted when other vendors claim that they are the only one that gives partners and end customers this option. They are not the only one. The choices to use a direct connection to the backend data, or the use of API connections will depend on the platforms, as well as the data. 

Our experience has given us the ability to connect to over 30 different source archive solutions and extract data to 20 different target solutions. Many of the large online enterprise archive solution providers will connect their customers directly to Trusted Data Solutions for migration projects.  Those vendors have worked with TDS for years which resulted in TDS being able to provide data to them in a manner that will make ingestion simple and complete.

Channel Partners have also reached out to Trusted Data Solutions with other archive migration vendors have attempted a migration at a customer location and failed. Trusted Data Solutions worked with these partners to execute the migration of this data to the new environment and subsequently rescued the project for the customer. Our Channel Partners recognize the history and capabilities of the Trusted Data Solutions products to ensure that their customers data will be moved safely, accurately and legally defensibly.  

For more information and questions about Trusted Data Solutions and archive migrations, please reach out to [email protected]

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