Centralized vs Distributed

The file management approach choice of your organization will determine your migration approach. If you have decided to manage and distribute all files from a central admin managed service account, you will choose a centralized migration approach. If distributing the shared folders to the owner’s individual user accounts, you will choose a distributed migration approach.

Centralized Migration is performing the migration of all files from the server and folder structure into an account and setting shared permissions to distribute documents to the end users. You will need to allocate enough Google Drive storage to this single account to house the amount of data that will be migrated and added in the future.

Distributed Migration is migrating individual folders and files directly to the user accounts of the owners of this content. This will allow you to distribute the files across the individual accounts, potentially avoiding purchasing additional storage above the default allotted user amount, depending on data size.

Single Migration vs Phased Rollout

At any given time, during the initial audit, there could be an employee uploading, downloading, syncing or referencing a file on the file server. If this is the case, communication in which platform is the “record of truth” for files to be accessed, updated and synced is critical in the migration process.

You will want to segment the migration into phases to minimize the amount of time in which the location of the files and “record of truth” are in transition. For some organizations with a small data size or less frequently updated file server scenarios, a one phase approach is feasible. However, more than likely you will want to rollout the migration in phases to reduce friction in business processes and clearly communicate this rollout in your communication plan.

Companies will often choose rollout phases primarily based on their file server folder structure and data size to easily track and manage the migration of the files. However you will want to consider the following in determining migration phases to ease coordination and management of the user communication:

• Business processes
• Structure of departments

Finding a happy medium that acknowledges all of these is ideal, but not always possible. Migrating less business critical folders / departments in the first phases is also a best practice when possible.

This article is Part 6 of Google Gooru’s Comprehensive Guide to Moving a File Server to Google Drive. To access the entire guide for FREE, please fill out the form located here.