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Integrating Legacy, On-Premises Storage with EFSS Platforms

Why 2016 is the Year of Hybrid Content Management

Research from Gartner: How to Migrate File Shares, SaaS and ECM to EFSS

Transitioning from On-Premises to Cloud-based Storage: Look Before You Leap

Case Study: Teach for America Successfully Migrates 2,500 Users to the Cloud

About SkySync

Issue 12

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Look Before You Leap

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Why 2016 is the Year of Hybrid Content Management

It’s becoming clear that 2016 is shaping up to be the Year of Hybrid Content Management. Looking further ahead, market researchers at Gartner predict that by 2019, 75% of enterprises will have deployed multiple Enterprise File Synchronization and Sharing (EFSS) capabilities and over 50% of them will struggle with problems of data migration from legacy to new repositories.

When you consider that many enterprises store tens to hundreds of millions of files that are often distributed among a wide variety of storage systems and locations, the process of syncing, migrating and backing up this volume of data – that can reach terabytes or petabytes – is daunting.

That’s why new “file logistics” tools are needed to automatically resolve incompatibilities between ECM systems, SharePoint, NFS, SAN or NAS systems when migrating and/or syncing to a cloud service.

This is borne out in the following Gartner Best Practice research note titled “How to Migrate File Shares, SaaS and ECM to EFSS.” I invite you to learn more about Gartner’s findings as you evaluate the right content management solutions for your enterprise.

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you’d like to discuss how we’ve helped over 1,500 customers around the globe successfully bridge both their on-premises storage and ECM systems to a variety of cloud-based EFSS services.

Regards,

Mark Brazeau, CEO and Co-FounderSkySync

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Research from Gartner

How to Migrate File Shares, SaaS and ECM to EFSS

• Due to the fast rate of change within the EFSS market resulting in quick product obsolescence, discuss an exit strategy with your EFSS provider and outline the costs involved.

Strategic Planning Assumption

By 2019, 75% of enterprises will have deployed multiple EFSS capabilities and over 50% of them will struggle with data migration, up from 10% today.

Introduction

Organizations of all sizes are deploying enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) products and services to provide end users with modern tools for work, including mobile access to files in an era when they no longer want to be limited by traditional enterprise content management (ECM) or network attached storage (NAS) platforms. Often, organizations deploy a company-managed EFSS platform to address situations that involve employees storing company data using their personal accounts on consumer-oriented public cloud services. This form of data leakage can have disastrous consequences when left unchecked.

Customers who adopt EFSS products often later consider consolidating other file repositories such as NAS file shares and ECM applications. But migrating to an EFSS platform has varying degrees of cost, complexity and completeness. There is a myriad of potential source and target platforms from which organizations may be migrating. Customers often find themselves stalled at the beginning of the planning process, not knowing what to migrate or the total size requiring migration.

Analysis

Avoid a Migration Entirely by Using EFSS ConnectorsSome EFSS platforms, such as those from Accellion and Egnyte, offer connectors to existing file shares and ECM platforms. The data in these existing systems are then made available through the EFSS platform without having to physically migrate or import anything. This has the benefit of not requiring a migration, but at the expense of maintaining an additional system and any governance policies implemented. This method also has the downside of not being real time,

Enterprises are deploying EFSS products to enable modern productivity and collaboration, but the options to migrate from existing platforms to EFSS platforms can be complicated. This research provides I&O leaders with details of the migration options and the trade-offs of each.

Key Challenges

• Migrating files to an EFSS platform involves a range of options with varying degrees of complexity and cost, including DIY approaches, content migration tools and professional services.

• Enterprises lack visibility into what is stored in their legacy ECM systems and file shares and therefore do not know what to migrate.

• Security and access control management responsibility shifts from IT to end users in the realm of EFSS, complicating top-down governance and security mandates.

• A mapping of existing metadata, taxonomies and workflows from legacy sources to new systems may not exist.

• Migrating away from EFSS applications delivered as SaaS offerings can be challenging due to proprietary metadata access, amount of data and bandwidth and request throttling.

Recommendations

• Exploit the use of EFSS connectors that enable user access to files stored in existing content repositories to avoid a migration entirely.

• Use file analysis tools to understand existing content and move only what is necessary to the new EFSS system, allowing data to age off in legacy systems when it makes sense.

• Prioritize cost, simplicity and completeness as critical evaluation criteria when determining how and what to migrate to an EFSS platform.

• Gradually introduce end users to the existence of a new system rather than issuing a mandate to avoid pre-emptive end-user revolt.

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meaning that changes and new files added through the file share or ECM application may not be reflected in the EFSS until it has been rescanned at a periodic interval.

Use File Analysis to Better Understand Your Content and Shed Legacy Content Baggage in the Process of MigrationUnderstanding what to migrate and how much data this might comprise is the first step in the process of migrating to an EFSS platform.

Not all content is worth retaining and migrating to EFSS. Gartner clients often discuss scenarios where file share and legacy ECM environments contain content that is several years old that may be redundant, outdated or trivial. A comprehensive approach to identifying content based on business value is to apply file analysis technology to these environments.

File analysis tools work by scanning supported file systems and repositories and then indexing their contents and file attributes. Enterprises can classify unstructured content through metadata and/or full text indexing and compile reports that assess the value of existing data and make the decision as to what to retain, discard or destroy. File analysis tools can uncover content that hasn’t been recently used and thus less valuable to migrate to an EFSS platform.

File analysis tools are typically also capable of moving bulk content to other storage environments based on policy, so they could be used in conjunction with approaches such as mounting file shares or to FTP drop sites as a gateway to EFSS.

Prioritize Cost, Ease Of Migration and Completeness as Critical Evaluation Criteria When Determining How to Migrate to an EFSS PlatformOrganizations should prioritize the most important objectives of a migration in terms of cost, ease of migration and the completeness of the migration itself and then select the option that best matches the sorted list of priorities.

Application Dependencies

Though there are several approaches to migrate content from source to target systems, EFSS platforms may not have analogs to some features commonly found in ECM applications. For instance,

workflow and business process management (BPM) features are common in ECM offerings, but are typically not found in EFSS platforms. Metadata about content is frequently used in ECM applications, but may be organized differently or not exist at all in EFSS platforms.

User applications that expect a file to be delivered through an ECM application may not work in the new EFSS environment depending on how it is integrated. Tight coupling to a proprietary ECM vendor’s API may break an application because of its dependency.

Organizations will need to either forgo these features or only migrate content not associated with these features found in legacy systems.

Rudimentary Copy

A rudimentary and low-tech option for moving content from file shares to an EFSS platform involves using operating system utilities to simply copy data from source to target. Both command line and applications with graphical user interfaces (GUIs) can be used to perform the copy, but with the trade-off of losing permissions mapping in the process. While not insurmountable, the rudimentary means of copying files ignores the notion of placing a particular user’s files in their own namespace in the target EFSS platform (see Table 1) .

Do-It-Yourself and Professional Services

Some organizations will favor a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach or one that involves professional services. These methods are not free of complication, particularly when the source systems are ECM applications such as SharePoint or EMC Documentum. The DIY approach becomes increasingly complicated when a complete migration from ECM platforms includes metadata and any security context required.

Developers will need to build custom connectors and normalize the data models to fit the content between the source and target systems. At the surface, this approach may seem appealing, particularly when an organization has expertise in the source systems. But there are many corner cases that will exponentially increase the amount of time required to build and test such connectors. The ultimate cost of these approaches can be inordinate and should only be used in unique scenarios where off-the-shelf approaches do not suffice.

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Some Gartner clients have used DIY approaches that involve the end user. In a scenario where organizations are moving from file shares to EFSS, end users are given instructions that detail how to copy their folders and files by simply dragging and dropping from source file shares to a destination sync folder. If clearly outlined, some users may be able to perform self-migrations or an IT-assisted migration as needed. This may not be practical for a large number of users or exceedingly large datasets.

Import Services

Some EFSS vendors, such as Box, offer a hard-disk drive (HDD) import service to ease migrations of large datasets. Box will ship you an encrypted HDD to which you copy files and ship back to Box. Box will then import the data into your account at a rate that is potentially far faster than if you uploaded it using the public Internet. Box charges $1 per GB with a $500 minimum. Box recommends that you use this method if you have at least 100GB data to import.

There’s always the possibility that a shipment gets lost or damaged in transit. But the most significant trade-off of using an HDD import service is that it doesn’t account for file metadata if the source data is from an ECM application or data that should be placed in a particular user’s folder rather than a common directory. Do not underestimate the speed of moving data using parcel delivery services compared to using the public Internet; for large datasets, a parcel delivery service may be significantly faster.

Third-Party Tools

Using a third-party content migration product can be significantly easier when migrating from a source ECM system or a file share to an EFSS platform. Automated tools from vendors such as

SkySync and Tervela can be used to migrate data between different systems with a few clicks, as they’ve already built connectors to support a wide number of source and target platforms.

SkySync, for instance, automatically attempts to handle the mapping between user home directories and users identified in an EFSS app such as Box. This has the benefit of being able to migrate data into an individual user’s namespace rather than just into a global namespace. SkySync also attempts to migrate metadata and security information, but may not work completely in all cases due to the complex nature of such a migration.

SkySync and Tervela can also be used to keep source and target systems synchronized. This is useful in cases when customers desire a hybrid approach where the EFSS is delivered in a software as a service (SaaS) model but the file shares are locally hosted on an enterprise network. This has the benefit of providing users with file share access, which is often comfortable in terms of the user experience, but with the added convenience of mobile and offline access with sync and share properties.

The downside of using these tools for synchronization purposes is maintaining multiple systems and the added cost of expanding storage footprint in multiple places. Synchronization also adds the complexity of conflict resolution when changes are being made at both the source and target. SkySync handles conflict resolution better than Tervela, which does not address this problem, but it is not neatly solved. Synchronizing disparate environments such as file shares and EFSS platforms may create untenable challenges in an environment with a large amount of changed data or when changes are being made to both source and target systems.

Table 1. Tools and Utilities

Name Operating System Notes

xcopy Windows Terminal-based copy application

rsync Linux, Unix Terminal-based source and target sync application

CyberDuck OS X, Windows GUI application supporting SCP, SMB, NFS, S3

Source: Gartner (January 2016)

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SkySync is software deployed on-premises and the data path for migrations always goes through the on-premises server as the company does not offer their product in a SaaS model. Tervela is delivered as a public cloud SaaS model and the data path is through a “point-of-presence” compute instance running in public cloud IaaS, such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, which is either managed by Tervela or the customer. As a result, each company’s product is best suited for different types of migrations. SkySync is ideal when the source system is on-premises or an ECM application. Tervela is ideal when the source and target systems are both delivered as SaaS and, thus, migrations can occur “cloud-to-cloud.” Tervela also has the ability to migrate on-premises solutions, such as file shares and SharePoint, to public cloud EFSS providers.1

SkySync and Tervela are licensed by the amount of data being synchronized or migrated. For larger environments, this can be expensive, but it is often a better choice than the DIY and professional services approach in terms of both cost and ease (see Table 2).

Migration Times

The mechanics of how a migration is performed is a critical aspect of planning a move to an EFSS platform. An equally important consideration, particularly when migrating to a public-cloud-delivered EFSS service, is the amount of time required for migrating content. The time required depends on the amount of data and the upstream bandwidth available. The larger the amount of total data, the smaller the network speed results in longer migration time (see Tables 3 and 4).

Gradually Introduce End Users to the Existence of a New System Rather Than Issue MandatesMaintaining an additional legacy system in the short term is a reasonable and suggested approach to gently acclimating users to the new EFSS endeavors. Organizational mandates that force users into a new EFSS application when replacing a legacy system in which they’re comfortable has the potential of backfiring. However, users need to be given a timetable and a migration

Platform SkySync Tervela

Box X X

Citrix ShareFile X X

Documentum X —

Dropbox X X

Dropbox for Business X X

Egnyte X —

File shares (NFS and CIFS) X X

Google Apps X X

Google Drive X X

Hadoop HDFS — X

Hightail X —

Huddle X —

IBM Content Manager X —

Office 365 X X

OpenText X —

Oracle Documents X —

Oracle Web Center X —

SharePoint X X

SugarSync X —

Syncplicty X —

Source: Gartner (January 2016)

Table 2. SkySync and Tervela Supported Platforms

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Table 3. Bandwidth Required for Migration

Network Speed

10 Mbps 50 Mbps 100 Mbps 500 Mbps 1 Gbps 10 Gbps

Theoretical Effective Throughput (80% of Line Speed)

1 MBps 5 MBps 10 MBps 48 MBps 96 MBps 954 MBps

Migration Data Size

Migration Time

Migration Time

10GB 2.9 hours 35.0 min 17.4 min 3.5 min 1.7 min 0.2 min

100GB 1.2 days 5.8 hours 2.9 hours 34.7 min 17.4 min 1.7 min

500GB 6 days 1.2 days 14.5 hours 2.9 hours 1.4 hours 8.7 min

1TB 12 days 2.4 days 1.2 days 5.8 hours 2.9 hours 17.5 min

10TB 121.5 days 24.3 days 12.1 days 2.4 days 1.2 days 2.9 hours

Mbps = Megabit per second MBps = Megabytes per second

Source: Gartner (January 2016)

Table 4. EFSS Migration Options Summary

Migration Complication and Migration Result

Potential Impacts

File Share Mounting Easy, Rudimentary No migration, free but costly due to maintaining existing NAS infrastructure

Rudimentary Copy Easy, Rudimentary Content can lose security context and permissions

DIY and Professional Services Complicated, Complete (but costly)

Lack of access to data during transition

HDD Import Services Easy, Rudimentary Lost HDDs, unencrypted access by technicians

Third-Party Tools Easy, Complete (but costly) Recommended for both small and large implementations

Source: Gartner (January 2016)

schedule if the source system will eventually be decommissioned or else users will never move.

Some users may be surprised or put off by the relative informality associated with EFSS if they’ve come from an ECM system that contains tools such as predefined workflows and document routing. Rolling out a gradual deployment to users through an early access program or those seeking content production and access improvements first versus a mass deployment may be a better step for some organizations.

Some customers identified for this research indicated that their users naturally discontinued use of file shares on a legacy NAS environment when they discovered ubiquitous access to content from both mobile devices and their personal computers. One customer was eventually able to phase out use of the NAS devices with no user revolt or disruption of any kind.2

Communicating with users throughout this process is critical. When use of the legacy system wanes, communicate the growth metrics of the EFSS

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system and the declining use of the legacy system to build a case for retiring the legacy environment.

Shifting Security Responsibility to Users

Administrators manage permissions and access controls for file shares, but this responsibility shifts from IT to end-users in the realm of EFSS. Many EFSS platforms allow users to share documents both internally and external to the organization. Partners and external suppliers can now collaborate on content that was once locked up inside the firewall in an enterprise NAS platform.

Users often have a better sense of who should have access to content, particularly that which is specific to their roles. The benefit is that collaboration won’t be impeded by having IT as a gatekeeper, but with the trade-off that users may occasionally make errors in their newfound abilities to share access to content.

Pragmatism About the Obsolescence of EFSSMigrating to an EFSS platform may be the short-term objective, but just like file shares and ECM, you will eventually want to migrate from your EFSS platform. Technology vendors may become less attractive, perhaps because they’ve been acquired and failed to continue innovating on their products. Technologies themselves will evolve and the impacts may present more efficient platforms and methods to manage enterprise data. Enterprises should be pragmatic about the longevity of EFSS and systems in general that are used to store and manage data.

Unwind an EFSS Migration

A migration away from an EFSS platform will likely be more complex than a migration from file shares. File shares can be mounted through NFS and CIFS and, thus, allow access to the entire repository of content. This may not be possible in an EFSS platform, particularly those delivered as SaaS, thus creating vendor lock-in.

Some EFSS services offer bulk download features, such as Google’s Takeout, that allow administrators to download an organization’s entire dataset in a series of compressed files that can be ported to other systems. This has the benefit of providing low barriers to download an organization’s data, but with the complexity of needing to properly read the downloaded data in the format supplied and then migrate to another platform.

Migration Times Will Vary

The time required to migrate to an EFSS vendor, particularly one hosted in the public cloud, may vary significantly depending on the vendor. This is because vendors have widely varying network capabilities. EFSS vendors may also rate limit customers’ bandwidth usage or API access, which is how third-party migration tools communicate with their EFSS service. Refer to Table 3 in this research to assess the amount time required for a migration based on the amount of data and bandwidth allocated to you by your EFSS provider. Factor in any API rate limiting your vendor may have in place.

Understand Post-Termination Clauses

Your EFSS provider, particularly if through a software as a service delivery, should have a post-termination clause in their contract with you. This clause specifies the window of time you have access to your data once the contract terminates. Most providers specify 30 days for organizations to copy their data out of the repository, but this is unlikely to be sufficient, particularly when the amount of data has grown substantially.

Recommendations:

• Demand that vendors provide longer than 30 days in the post-termination clause to allow more time to copy your data from their service if required in the future.

• Plan and begin a migration well ahead of the post-termination window to assure that you’re not attempting to complete and validate that a thorough migration has occurred up until the end of the window.

• Discuss an exit strategy with your EFSS provider to understand the particulars of that provider and any limitations implemented.

• Use third-party tools to migrate away from EFSS services, particularly when a pain-free migration is valued.

Evidence1Briefings with SkySync, Tervela and EFSS vendors.

2Discussions with SkySync customers who have deployed their application.

Excerpt from Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00146107, Massimo Pezzini, Milind Govekar, Yefim V. Natis, Donna Scott,

13 February 2007

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Transitioning from On-Premises to Cloud-based Storage: Look Before You Leap

By Mark Brazeau, SkySync CEO

Fortune 500 and SMB companies alike are plunging headfirst into cloud-based storage services for all the right reasons: reduced CAPEX, greater agility, streamlined management overhead and improved collaboration. But enterprises big and small are finding out there’s a considerable “gotcha” when it comes to bridging their on premises storage systems – whether that includes Network File Systems, SharePoint or various flavors of Enterprise Content Management platforms – with various cloud services.

That “gotcha” boils down to three primary challenges that have plagued enterprises for nearly three decades: the synchronization, migration and/or backup of files that for many organizations can represent terabytes if not petabytes of data storage. What organizations are finding out – the hard way – is that this is not a trivial undertaking. Their assumption is that content (or files) can simply be “bulk transferred” from their on-premises storage systems to the cloud with the click of a mouse. Wrong.

The harsh reality is that bridging tens to hundreds of millions of files distributed across disparate storage systems and geographies to the cloud is a lot harder than anticipated. That’s because individual files contain unique properties, metadata, versions and permissions. And accommodating these variables when moving data from or between on-premises and cloud storage services has proven to be an integration nightmare.

So what’s the solution? There is a significant and increasingly urgent need for a new layer of middleware that provides an intelligent membrane between on-premises and cloud-based storage systems that can preserve the integrity of folder structures, metadata, permissions, document versions and other file-related artifacts - without having to engage an army of integrators.

So what’s needed to overcome on-premises to cloud storage migration obstacles?

Complexities of Syncing, Migrating or Backing up to Cloud Services Today

In a perfect world, enterprises big and small would prefer to have a single repository for all of their structured and unstructured content. Imagine the reduction in management complexity and cost that scenario would offer. But that’s a pipe dream today.

Organizations have made considerable investments in varying flavors of on-premises storage systems. And many continue to implement disparate enterprise content management systems to help meet increasing demands from users that need access to information shared well beyond the corporate firewall.

The challenge, however, is that the vast majority of today’s enterprises deploy a hodge-podge of content silos scattered across business units and geographies. That said, trying to corral content from different repositories isn’t new. In fact, it’s a problem that has plagued IT for going on 30 years. During the decade of the 90’s, there was a movement to integrate existing NFS storage with image-based ECM systems. The next decade saw the emergence of content and portal-enabled ECM systems. And now we’re in the midst of the next mega-trend: cloud-based storage platforms.

What history has taught us is that consolidating storage systems is incredibly complex because each is unique. Getting so-called “hybrid” platforms to co-exist has proven to be elusive; when you factor in requirements to manage millions of files, folders, permissions, metadata, versions, file locks and more between incompatible systems, it’s understandable why this problem has persisted for three decades. Lest we forget, consolidation efforts are challenged even further by incompatible file names due to “long paths” or illegal characters when migrating content from one system to another. It’s little wonder why we continue to see a veritable “31 Flavors” of network shares in many enterprises today.

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Source: SkySync

FIGURE 1 TBD

Some may argue that if you can migrate the majority of content between systems, it’s “good enough”. The counter-argument is that even if you successfully move 95% of an enterprise’s files (and that’s an awfully generous assumption) the remaining 5% could represent millions of exceptions. Try selling that to a compliance officer, especially if you’re tasked with trying to sync, migrate or backup SharePoint, NFS and/or ECM platforms with cloud services including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Office 365, Syncplicity, Huddle and more.

The Time Has Come for a New Middleware Layer

Gartner analysts have predicted that more and more organizations will be looking to hybrid content management in the coming years. What’s needed to make a hybrid content architecture successful is an intelligent middleware membrane that can automatically resolve incompatibilities between ECM systems, SharePoint, NFS, SAN or NAS systems when migrating and/or syncing to a cloud service.

Given the fact that enterprises are under increasing pressure to develop better collaboration strategies for their distributed workforces in order to achieve greater productivity, enhanced competitiveness and more rapid time-to-market advantages, the cost, time and resources to transparently integrate content silos must be radically streamlined.

And that’s going to require an intelligent middleware layer capable of handling the migration and bi-directional synchronization of files, folder hierarchies, properties, versions, map permissions, user accounts and meta data on the fly without expensive integration efforts. Without this capability, the full potential of hybrid content architectures will be compromised significantly.

Reprinted with permission of WestWorldWide, LLC, publishers of Computer Technology Review. Copyright 2015. All rights reserved.

Source SkySync

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Case Study: Teach for America Successfully Migrates 2,500 Users to the Cloud

Organizational Profile

Teach for America is a non-profit organization with a mission to eliminate educational inequity by developing committed leaders in our classrooms today who will continue to fight for our students tomorrow. The organization, founded 25 years ago, recruits committed recent college graduates and professionals of all backgrounds to teach for two years in urban and rural public schools. It also trains and develops these corps members so that they have an immediate positive impact on their students.

The Problem

With content scattered across 50 regional offices and no simple way to access and share organizational data located within local Network File Systems, Teach for America employees began using Cloud storage services on their own with no oversight or security from IT.

To give users ownership of their content and enable secure sharing inside and outside of the organization, TFA’s IT department made the decision to migrate its more than 2,500 users from on-premises NFS to Box. However, moving that content manually and organizing it into individual Box accounts became a time-consuming process.

“Initially we let users pick and choose what they wanted to move to Box on their own, but some users had more than 10gb of data each. It was decided that IT should handle such a complex process. We needed something that could easily sync our local servers to Box, while maintaining our permissions and file structures as well,” said Amish Chudasama, Senior Director of Enterprise Services and Integrations at Teach for America.

The Solution

“We searched the internet for different solutions, and Box recommended SkySync to us,” said Patti Santacroce, TFA’s Managing Director of Enterprise Services. “With SkySync, we got the help we needed from day one and were able to quickly put it into production.”

Using SkySync’s User Home-Drive Mapping and Advanced Folder Grouping tools, Teach for America was able to begin migrating its user base and

easily replicate entire folder hierarchies to Box with a few clicks of a mouse. “It was a very simple, easy way to transfer our users to Box, especially the ones with large drives,” Santacroce said.

“SkySync’s ability to create folders was a lifesaver,” TFA’s Director of Enterprise Services, Anthony Jarrett added. “Initially we would have had to move content from our shared folders to Box, and then manually recreate folders on the Box side. SkySync automatically creates folders right out of our shared drives, which has saved us thousands of hours.”

And because SkySync tracks the state of all migration processes, the move to Box has been painless. “SkySync is completely self-maintaining,” Jarrett said. “If it encounters an error during a job, it will go back automatically and just pick up folders and files it missed instead of starting over at the beginning. Doing that manually would have been a nightmare. It simply would not have worked.”

The Results

With the migration close to 70 percent complete, TFA’s IT department has already begun to decommission its local servers as users have adopted Box, enabling them to scale back on overhead and staff resources required to manage the servers. And reports have shown hard evidence that users are actively leveraging Box’s sharing and syncing capabilities.

“Box has all of the capablities that our users wanted and we are able to regularly monitor their activity,” Santacroce said. “They are in charge of their data and how they collaborate most effectively.”

Stellar Technical Support

“One of the biggest reasons for our success was the help that we got from the SkySync team,” Santacroce added. “SkySync’s Technical Support Director was incredible. He held our hands in the beginning to get us started and even now, he’ll drop what he’s doing to help us out when we need it.”

Source SkySync

“SkySync has saved us thousands of hours.”

– Anthony Jarrett, Teach for

America Director of Enterprise Services

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About SkySync

SkySync® is a wholly-owned product of Portal Architects, Inc., an Ann Arbor, Michigan-based company. Portal Architects’ development and architectural staff is comprised of several Senior .NET engineers, with extensive Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Business Process Management (BPM) and Microsoft SharePoint development expertise.

SkySync streamlines cloud adoption by enabling organizations to easily integrate content from existing storage platforms. SkySync makes it simple to migrate on-site system files and associated data across platforms or create fully bi-directional, synchronized hybrid storage scenarios. Architected for any size environment, SkySync is deployed at 1500+ businesses worldwide and across a wide range of industries.

For more information, please visit www.skysync.com.

Look Before You Leap is published by SkySync. Editorial content supplied by SkySync is independent of Gartner analysis. All Gartner research is used with Gartner’s permission, and was originally published as part of Gartner’s syndicated research service available to all entitled Gartner clients. © 2016 Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. The use of Gartner research in this publication does not indicate Gartner’s endorsement of SkySync’s products and/or strategies. Reproduction or distribution of this publication in any form without Gartner’s prior written permission is forbidden. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable. Gartner disclaims all warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such information. The opinions expressed herein are subject to change without notice. Although Gartner research may include a discussion of related legal issues, Gartner does not provide legal advice or services and its research should not be construed or used as such. Gartner is a public company, and its shareholders may include firms and funds that have financial interests in entities covered in Gartner research. Gartner’s Board of Directors may include senior managers of these firms or funds. Gartner research is produced independently by its research organization without input or influence from these firms, funds or their managers. For further information on the independence and integrity of Gartner research, see “Guiding Principles on Independence and Objectivity” on its website.