We have a really great panel of specialists, to take us on this journey. So I’ll be moderating. I’m Alex de Luceno. I’m Shield’s director of product strategy, and I’m just gonna kinda pick on each of you, on my screen. Simon, Tom, then Anthony, tell us who you are and why you’re here. Simon Otit. I’m the director of EMEA at Incentra, and I’ve been in the archive and migration space for, best part of fifteen years. And I’ve either, delivered, led, or sold a little over five hundred projects in this space. Yeah. Tom? Hi, everyone. My name is Tom Rimmer. I’m a regional sales manager at Shield. I’ve had the pleasure in dealing with these types of projects. I think the earliest one was two thousand and three. So I’ve seen a lot of clients and prospects go through the challenges of change, and hopefully bring you some, the stories that we’ve seen and some of the challenges we’ve had to address. Oh, and Anthony. Hi, Anthony. Diana. I’m a partner here at Reed Smith, part of our emerging technologies and bank tech group. Been working with data migrations, actually messaging archives for probably about twenty years or so, and I’ve done dozens of migrations and usually focused on the legal and regulatory issues associated with these migrations. Great. Great. And so so happy to have everyone here. So let’s start off with sort of, like, a a an imagined exercise. Right? I think when firms imagine moving to a new archive, I think it makes intuitive sense. Right? If we imagine it, like, move it moves we know, move in from one house to another. The old house, hasn’t kept up. It’s harder to maintain. It doesn’t, accommodate new technology as well as, say, the new house. Right? And that makes sense. But then migration is something different. It’s this different related animal, and that’s where we would imagine that everything in the basement in that old house, all the old exercise equipment and kids’ toys and everything else has to move into this new house. Right? And it doesn’t just have to move into this new house. It has to make sense. We have to know where everything is no matter how old it is and what have you. And I start to articulate things in that way, and I start to feel tangible fear. I don’t wanna do it. Right? And so I think a good place to start as we sort of think about migrations, because so many organizations choose not to, right, or to kick the can down the road or maintain two archives or three archives. I’ve seen it. Right? So, Tom, as someone who’s convinced people to migrate, let’s start with you. Let’s talk about what that fear is and what drives it. Yeah. I think you’re right, Alex. It’s going back to your analogy of the house. You see a house. You like the new house. That’s I wouldn’t say it’s the easy part, but it’s straightforward. That new technology, you can see the benefits. You can see the advantages straight away. But then you think about that old house. How do I move that your your valuable jewelry, your valuable data? You know, what’s the risk of if you lose some of that, what’s the risk in some of, that data leakage? So those most organizations, it’s their crown jewels. How do they protect it? How can they do that safely, securely? How do they make sure that, when they take it to the new environment, it’s still gonna deliver, really, the outcomes that they want? So if you’re gonna be if you’re moving from one archive to the other, you still need to be able to discover. You still need to be able to find that information. Now are you taking it into a new environment? And you won’t be able to do that. What’s the risk in that? And, again, I suppose it’s through a huge amount of risk with the regulator. Are you will you lose data? Is this data spoilation? There’s so many, I suppose, concerns around that corruption of that data and what will it look like in the new house. So I think the other side of it is who else needs to be involved in these projects. So it’s not just the concern of the data. It’s, well, who else within my organization needs to make sure that they see the processes we’re going to go through, all of the the preparation we need to do? Who are those groups that I need to involve in this this project? It’s a challenge. Right. And, Anthony, there has to be some regulatory component to this too that kinda holds people up. So, you know, kinda what’s what’s the what’s the nut of that? Like, what why is that such a source of fear? Yeah. I mean, look. I think one of the, like, people are always afraid of stuff they don’t understand. Right? So a lot of legal and compliance folks who are brought in to say, oh, we wanna do this migration. They don’t know enough to say, you know, what are the risks that I have to start mitigating? What are the steps? Oftentimes, because people don’t explain it to them. So when you explain what the risks are, when you explain here’s the steps that we’re taking to mitigate those risks, they get comfortable, but someone has to be there to explain. And I think usually what happens, is that bluntly, oftentimes, legal and compliance aren’t paying attention. They don’t understand it or they’re told after the fact. And then they’re said told, well, sign off on this. And they’re like, what am I signing off on? So I think that’s that’s one of the challenges, I think, for the industry as a whole is getting people to understand what some of the risks are. These risks are, you know, accepted in a lot of ways with these migrations, like error rates and stuff like that, that, you know, happen did say five hundred plus of these migrations and related projects. Right? So just anything else to add, any through lines, just that level of fear that kind of holds people back or organizations back, bro. Yeah. I I think a couple of the big ones are they know they need to do something, but their platform is aging, and they’re fearful that even touching it, extracting large volumes of data is gonna cause it to come down. And, ultimately, a lot of the time they do nothing is they think doing nothing, it’s easier just to keep the lights on than it is to risk hitting the storage too hard or whatever it might be to start pulling that data out. And and it’s just a huge amount of fear as to, well, the platform already doesn’t perform that well. What are you gonna do to it in order to get all the data out? Sure. It’s very devil you know. Right? A hundred percent. The other big one that everybody is fearful of is time. Like, ultimately, a big driver around a lot of these programs is, the TCO in terms of getting out of their existing platform and into the new one. And I would say probably the second question pretty much every customer asks is how long is it gonna take? And they’re fearful that it’s not gonna get done in a timeline that’s gonna help them hit hit their, their their, investment timelines ultimately. Right. So that that’s actually perfect for, I think, how I how I wanted to kind of frame, I think, the rest of our discussion and and really kind of what we wanna kind of I I think if we can give the audience, I think, something to kind of hold on to and and and really reflect on, like, as it relates to migration, I think that’s kind of what I like out of this. And so as a framing mechanism, I can think of three kinds of organizations when it comes to migration. Right? And the first is gonna be the brave. These are the people who are embracing transformation. They’re embracing new technology. Right? They’ve done their homework, and they’re ready to migrate for all these sort of, let’s call it, you know, for these brave reasons. Right? Because it is it is brave to take this leap. Right? But they vetted it, and it makes sense, that kind of thing. Now on the other side, you have the desperate. These are people who are in end of life scenarios. They’re paying for support. Their platform doesn’t work at all. A regulator wants them to do something that their platform can’t do, etcetera, etcetera. Right? So they’re moving, but they’re desperate, and they’re doing it under constrained circumstances, awful timelines, paying money that they hadn’t budgeted, etcetera. Right? And those are the people who usually move. Now in the middle, we have the middle. That’s everyone else that’s sort of waiting, not sure, sitting on this data, that kind of thing. Right? And so we’re gonna move through each of those. I wanna start with the desperate, and, Simon, you just kinda started to touch on it. Let’s talk about some of, you know, when we think about the need for change, how legacy technology, can drive the desperate, legacy platforms don’t store, much more than mail and and in occasional scenarios, a little bit of instant message. But with the amount of regulatory and compliance requirement that started to hit most businesses now and the need to retain vast amounts of kind of disparate data. They just don’t have the capability with a number of their platforms to to consolidate all that information in a single place, which is easy to access, easy to search, etcetera. Then and that kind of drives the need to get off what they’re on. And the other big one, which we touched on a little bit earlier, was just aging infrastructure. Like, they’re they’ve they’ve had a a large investments, arguably, CapEx investments that they’ve been sweating for a really long time, and it’s now coming to that point where they can’t continue to sweat it and the cost of maintenance and all of the other bits and pieces that go into it are forcing their hand. It’s not that they want to do it. They have to do it. Because if they don’t, they’re gonna fall out of, some of their internal compliance requirements in terms of being an unstable system and being able to maintain it and provide information in a in a reasonable amount of time. They they are really desperate. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and, Tom, like, would be in an an on premise archive sort of lead to any sort of sense of desperation, or not? Yeah. I think Simon’s just really touched on it. What what we’re seeing in more and more discussions that we’re having with current clients or prospects is they’ve sweated those assets. They need to change. They’re seeing end of life statements come up from some of these legacy platforms. How do they how do they maintain them? How do they keep the upgrades? Those internal costs. There’s a lot of conversations we have about tile costs and, you know, really, what what is that burning? And a lot of them have the strategy to move to the cloud. They want the benefits of the cloud and the modern, capabilities it has out there. So there is a desire, and we see more and more and more of those desires to say, look. No. I want to take this into the cloud. I know I can get the benefit. I know there’s value out there. Can you help me? How can I move up there? So we have a lot of those conversations. But just But I would just flip Well, go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry. I was gonna flip one side on that. It’s not just on prem, though, that we’re seeing. We’re seeing some of those legacy cloud vendors as well that have, really, their own private clouds, their proprietary systems. They’re kind of caught by these these vendors. They’re hostage, and there’s there’s things you know, vendors having hostage costs in there, cost to export. All of those are starting to so you’ve kind of got a balance. There’s on prem that are driving the need to change, but there’s also these legacy cloud platforms as well. Right. And, look, I think the ransom costs or the hostage costs is a is a great example because, you know, you’re trying to sell something internally, an opportunity, right, knowing that the cost is going up, you know, to get your data out on this other thing. And where’s the benefit you’re selling? Right? You know, it’s it’s just a fee. Right? You know, like, and it’s just going up. Right? And that can really make people hesitate as as they do it. I know another one I’ve seen is with all the new you know, with the amount of channels and the volume across those channels, it’s just data integrity. Right? Is people needing to be comfortable that everything, coming in could be accounted for, reconciled, playback, played back, and all of that. And that’s another thing that a lot of legacy systems have really struggled with. When it was all EML coming in, they could say ninety nine point nine is here, percent is here, come up with something to automatically replay it. But now you’re getting a Slack feed from a third party. Right? And they don’t have the tooling, and it could be an internal tech team or it could be the platform themselves. Neither really has the tooling to provide that kind of, overview of what’s going in to say, okay. Everything’s there. And it makes people really, you know, nervous. And then, every question I promise, Anthony, every question won’t be with regards to regulations and regulators, but you are, I think, the most experienced, like, on this panel across that. But, you know, how do you see sort of regulatory pressures or any specific findings, sort of driving the desperate, you know, among this group? Yeah. I mean, Alec, I think people hit on it. I think a number of things. Number one, which no one likes to hear, but the SEC and FINRA have been pretty open about this is they view any costs associated with record keeping, archiving, surveillance is the cost of doing business. So as complex and everything as it is and, frankly, as expensive it is, you don’t get any sympathy by saying, but it’s really expensive to do this. Right? So that’s number one. And that includes going into a new archive or whatever. Second, I think, is, as people hit on, there are, you know, I think regulators are looking more and more at different types of data sources that they think should be archived and and capped surveilled and the like. You You know, FINRA just came out, and it was a clarification. But last week, they came out and said, look. You know, artificial intelligence, if you’re working if your customers are using artificial intelligence with your applications, that is an electronic communication that has to be captured. I mean, it was pretty clear that’s what they expected, which makes sense because you may be getting investment advice from your artificial intelligence tool, and you have to look at it and make sure it’s fine. So that is, you know, the tip of the iceberg. I think the other thing that worries me quite a bit is the as the regulators start really thinking about other collaboration type tools, whether it’s Zoom meetings and team meetings, they don’t they haven’t really said what is gonna be needed to be captured. I think that’s something that we’re looking very carefully about. And, again, I think as other people said, a lot of these legacy archives, they were built for email in that format, and none of this stuff is email. So you’re transforming it and putting it in the archive, and that is a risk from a data integrity perspective and the like. And that’s again, we’re looking and testing all the time when these when these different channels go into the archive. What does it look like? When I get it out, what does it look like? Because you don’t wanna be in a situation with a regulator, and they’re saying, what is this gibberish that you just produced to me? And your answer is, well, we just shoved it in there. At the time, it met our regs, and now it’s coming back out. The fact that you don’t understand what it is is not my problem. That’s not an answer. Right? Date integrity matters. And, again, I think this goes back to you have to be careful, and I don’t and I I don’t think a lot of the legacy archives are gonna be fit for purpose, in essence. Right? Some of the old stuff, I mean, frankly, when we shove Lotus Notes stuff stuff in there and stuff like that, it’s still bad. But you’re dealing with that. I think the other thing to keep in mind, just in terms of functionality, is regulators, particularly in the privacy side, are really focused on deleting data that you don’t need. And a lot of these legacy systems don’t really have good functionality for routinely deleting, you know, messaging data that you don’t need anymore. Right? You have to pay be you have to apply retention. You have to apply legal holds. It’s very complex, and they have to be able to meet that. I I think there’s only a matter of time before regulators start really noticing how much data is just sitting there historically, and just there’s no need for it. Right? All of this is risk. I would tell my clients, all you’re sitting on is risk. There’s no business benefit for it. You don’t need it for legal and regulatory purposes. It’s just sitting there, risk, you know, whether it’s a litigation risk, whether it’s a, you know, a risk for privacy perspective like, but it’s all risk. And, again, not always accounted for when you think about the cost associated with these archives, but that to me is one of the big things. You’re paying for storage of data that is just risk. And that Well, it terrifying people. A dirty secret too is that a lot of, organizations, certainly in the last ten years, lifted their deletion, right, as a risk mitigant. Right? And and because storage was relatively cheap right now as as that volumes increase, that’s changed. You know, that that equation’s changed, but they sort of assumed, like, we can afford to just keep keeping it. Right? And now they’re faced with an end of life. They have to move it, and you have to. You’re just confronting so much more. Quick thing. I forgot to say at the top that for people listening, if you do have questions, pop them in the Zoom chat. You know, we’ll we’ll kinda deal with them in flow if they’re relevant, or we’ll address them at the end. And and, sorry for not saying that, earlier, but we we wanna hear from anybody, everybody. So please, if you have questions okay. So we talked about the desperate. Right? Let’s talk about the brave. Right? Let’s talk about the people who are sort of making, decisions to to to make these moves preemptively, right, before they have to, before their backs are against the wall and and and and that kind of thing. So you touched on it quickly, Tom. SaaS, the cloud, let’s start there. And and then, Anthony, you take over because I know this is something you’ve championed a lot and also to give you a nonregulatory question. Yeah. The, you know, the new technology that’s out there, the cloud that we’re using, it’s flexible. The performance is there. You know, some of the capabilities that we speak to our clients about, you know, when they’re doing discovery, You know, it may be over, you know, five or six, people, but it’s taking over twenty four hours to get those results to come back in legacy systems. You know, what you’ve got in latest technologies and using some of the performance that you can get, it’s immediate results. Over billions of records, you can actually get the outcomes coming back quicker. If they come back quicker, you can address them quicker. There’s more technology around how you can reduce that amount that you’re exporting out to the regulator or litigation. So there’s so many great tools and benefits in some of the latest technology out there. So I I think the the brave accept that. See the outcome. See the benefits and the cost drivers for it. I think you you you were saying earlier, Alex, a lot of the conversation is that time to value. How can we get to that value the quickest? And they’re looking at cloud being a great way to install and get up and running quickly. And it’s also I think Simon mentioned this, being able to support all those different varied content types that are coming in. So those new channels that are coming in, we’re not wrapping it as an email. We’re putting it in there in its native format that you can then drive the values. You can get a lot more conceptual understanding of what that information is. So there’s there’s so many things from a not just a technology, but a cost of ownership that you can drive through some of the latest cloud technology. Alright. And, Anthony, what what would you add? I think I think you end up talking I think helping a lot of clients on their cloud journeys. Right? Yeah. And I think look. I think, as was pointed out, I think for most most sophisticated IT personnel and like, their plan is to put everything in the cloud. Right? Like, that’s that’s the that’s where that world is heading. They wanna put their data in the cloud. I mean, ten years ago, particularly financial institutions were very hesitant to put stuff in the cloud. But I think once they got comfortable, they see the advantages. And most of these, you know, IT IT, you know, departments are really focused on innovation, productivity. You know? They wanna they wanna capture that, and it’s the best place to put it is in the cloud. And, you know, because you can get all the innovation, whether it’s using AI or whatever within that environment. It makes a big difference when it’s in the cloud because it can you know, that adoption of innovation is so much quicker. There’s still lots of risk associated with it, but I think that’s that’s, you know, sort of a given now, along with the costs and all the other things that I think are with, you know, cost savings and, like, that people believe will happen when you go to the cloud. Right. I think one thing I used to kind of always point out when when, you know, when I was on compliance side not too long ago was how much we already live in the cloud. You know, sort of it feels like, you know, you’re you’re you’re you’re you know, the the train has left. Right? And so, you know, we were sort of in this situation where, you know, we were sort of hesitating about, moving to the archive, you know, moving our whole archive into the cloud. Right? But all our teams were in the cloud. Right? And they flew through the cloud and back into our private cloud and and that kind of thing. We had a few other channels that did that. Right? And then our consumer experience, you know, we put our kids’ pictures in the cloud, you know, and and that kind of thing. So it’s sort of like, well, what are we really resisting? Right? So I think the the brave are are are often organizations who recognize that, but often then also have these sort of digital transformation. And you see the role a lot now. Right? Is is is is people and teams who are in charge with not just getting an organization onto a cloud, but really trying to figure out how to clean up all the wires under the desk, right, and make, and really get their their their their organizations technologically in a in a place in a future forward place beyond just the archive connectors, surveillance, you know, across the board. Simon, I think another thing that comes up and maybe, you know, comes across your desk is just firms developing, say, AWS or Azure specific strategies. I mean, there’s some synergies there too that are probably worth calling them out. Yeah. Look. I think I think the big one is that a lot of the the drive for for cloud around rebaselining, what they’re doing in the data center, etcetera, is forcing them off their older platforms. That that’s the big one. And they’re looking at their existing platforms and, like, look, we can do the standard listmanship doing the cost modeling for for doing that, realizing the level of pain that they’re likely to go through if they move like for like. And therefore, that’s that’s ultimately the big driver there. Right? Especially with with that cloud first strategy. I would take a slightly different view to to the rest of the panel where I think it’s less about a cloud first strategy as much as it is about an as a service strategy for a lot of these businesses. They wanna they wanna get rid of a lot of the ongoing administrative overhead and the investment that’s required in terms of, just the knowledge and skill set to maintain a lot of these platforms. And that’s what, the investment in the likes of AWS AWS and Azure, etcetera, really allowed them to do because somebody else is taking care of a lot of the more difficult components that allows them to consume the the tools that they ultimately wanna use as a service. Great. So let’s let’s move to that middle now. Right? And I think for the rest of the discussion, right, I wanna talk about how that middle plans executes and sees through a a a great migration. Right? So we understand the brave, you know, what they’re embracing. We understand the desperate, why they have to do it. But in the middle, said someone who could, should, is open to, but isn’t. So, Anthony, first, if they’re not moving to the cloud or they’re not, you know, they’re not migrating yet, what are they doing with those new archives as they move? Yeah. I mean, look. I think we’ve seen this time and again. I the the business case is often a lot easier to say, we’re gonna go to a new archive. Right? It’s for all the reasons we just talked about. Okay. So all new data, we’re gonna put in that new archive. We’re gonna take advantage of the cloud. We’re gonna take all this stuff. I don’t wanna say that’s the easy sell, but that’s the easy sell. The harder sell is, okay. What do we do with the old stuff? Some people have had data there sitting there twenty years, ten years. It’s not you know? Because a lot of times, like I said, they haven’t been deleting. And that’s that’s a much harder business case to make. I mean, I think that’s one of the things that’s from a for both from an IT perspective, a legal perspective, like, as we talked about, there’s a lot of fear associated with it. You know, most people don’t even know what is in the archive going back that far. Like, they may have done searches and stuff, but oftentimes, there were other migrations or acquisitions, and they just shove data in. So it’s a challenge, right, because it’s not necessarily clean. So there’s you know, a lot of people say, well, I’ll let it die in the vine. Right? We’ll we’ll apply some type of retention legal holds and delete it. Now my perspective is because they haven’t been doing that anyway, that’s a lot of work. Right? It’s not easy to say, okay. Now we’re gonna start deleting it. It’s not as passive an exercise as they would think. Right? It’s the same amount of work. Right? You’re still gonna have to analyze what’s there. Do I have it on legal hold? All the identity issues, which is always a big issue when you’re dealing with particularly really old legacy data. Can I identify people who are on legal hold? What are all the aliases they had on the stuff? So that is you know, even though people say they’re gonna let it die on the vine, what I generally see is it’s not it’s not dying on the vine. It’s just literally dying. Right? It’s the the technology dies, but the data isn’t because it’s still sitting there because they haven’t done the work to actually figure out how to delete out of that system. And like I said, oftentimes, it’s really clunky to start deleting out of these old systems, because they weren’t really designed for that. So you’re you’re doing all these workarounds. And and, again, it’s always a challenge to say, do I start deleting and then migrate? Do I migrate everything? Do I migrate some of it? And, you know, basically, the migration is part of your decommissioning strategy where you’re only migrating certain data. That’s the ideal situation. Again, not always easy to do, but these are the things that you have to think through. But I don’t think dying on the vine look. What you’re doing is kicking it down to somebody else. Right? Like, I making a decide we say, making a decision not to do something is making a decision that you wanna keep it. And no one’s gonna say they wanna keep the legacy archive, but lots of people say we don’t wanna get rid of it. And that’s it’s a it’s it’s a weird construct, but that’s often what happens. And, eventually, they’re gonna have to migrate. I mean, there’s no such thing as dying on the vine. Like, they don’t there will always be legal holds. So you’re either gonna say for the next ten years, I’m still gonna have this thing, or you just make the decision of, okay. When am I gonna do it? It may not be immediate. Right? You can plan for two, three years down the line, but I think you should always be considering that leaving it is not really an option. You’re gonna have to migrate it eventually. So so let let’s let’s help these people out then. So what’s the first what’s the first kind of component piece then of a good migration? Right? I think it’s having a plan. Right? Which sounds simple. Right? But we’re talking about a pretty complicated plan. So let’s talk you know, Tom, let’s let’s start with you. Like, what someone wants to move. How are they gonna stage that so that they can make the case? What does that plan look like? I think preparation is key. It’s, you know, I think everyone thinks right that the technology it’ll take you know, Simon mentioned earlier, you know, technology takes time to bring the data over and things. The technology’s moved on. You know, the speed that you can migrate these days is is a lot quicker. So some of that challenge has been answered. But actually putting, really, the the time and effort upfront in that preparation and that planning is key. So, you know, bringing in the experts that have done this, bringing in the experts that know the data, know your your, channels, etcetera, is is really key. The likes of Simon and, you know, Anthony, just giving you the advice there is is key. What you know, some of the the key aspects that we look, you know, is let’s really understand that legacy platform. Where is the data? Where is your data mapping? What type of date, you know, what type of data sources have come in? So it’s it’s understanding the environment you’ve got at the start. It’s understanding the outcomes that you want to see in that data in that new environment because as you move that data over, is there any changes? Will it act the same way? Will it represent the same way? And, also, another big area is, and I think I said it earlier, is understanding the groups within your own organization that are gonna be involved in this decision and bringing them in really early. You know, there there was a project that, I did many years ago now. IT drove the the move and the migration and were really key. Got a lot of, effort, but, you know, what really kind of was the, I suppose, the the gatekeeper that really slowed them down was making sure that security came along with that ride, making sure that the records management team came along on that ride because they then had to do their own due diligence, had to do their own work, which again slowed the project down, slowed that time to value again down. So really early on, making sure you’ve got that team, making sure you’ve got, you know, the those different subject matter experts within your own company along the ride really at the early stages. Right. And then I think, you know, Anthony, you already zeroed in on, you know, just the the the the questions around legal hold and data deletion deletion and that kind of thing. Right? So what does that conversation look like with legal as you’re helping them plan? Like, how do you get them to have a disposition around data, around deletion and post migration? Like, how do I mean, I think, one, it’s it’s setting expectations about what decisions you expect legal and compliance to make, right, during the migration. And, ultimately, where you’re going is someone’s gonna have to sign off and say, we’re d you’re decommissioning this legacy archive. Could be billions of messages, and they’re all subject to like, someone is gonna have to put their name on the signature, and that is always one of the hardest things to do. But you have to prepare them that that’s the ask. Right? The ask is you’re gonna have to say you could delete, you know, and decommission this, and that’s hard. Second, I think, you know, what I often tell them is if everything is documented, and the regulators want this too, everything has to be documented. Right? There’s there are lots of decisions, by the way, along the way besides decommissioning. It’s, like I said before, error rates. Right? We assume that coming out of, you know, billions of messages, not every one of them is gonna migrate correctly. Right? There’s always errors. Legal doesn’t always understand that. You have to explain that’s that’s standard. Right? It’s standard. There’s gonna be some errors. The key is legal and compliance have to agree that whatever errors they are are really errors and they’re comfortable with them. Right? Again, that’s an explanation. That’s something that we always document. Right? That’s a to me, it’s a big part of the migration is you have a solutions design document upfront that says, here’s our expected errors, and you start having those conversations with legal compliance. Like, these are standard errors. It could be corrupt, particularly the older stuff. They just have to understand that and, frankly, accept it. Right? They’re gonna have to accept the risk, that some of this stuff is gonna be there. But, you know, oftentimes, I say, you can’t get out of the legacy archive either. Right? It’s these migrations often show how bad the legacy migration the the legacy archive is because a lot of it’s corrupt. Right? And you’re not getting in the old archive either. So those are the types of decisions that you have to get legal and compliance to think about. Think through like I said, documenting everything is important. Regulators want the documentation because if there’s ever an issue, they’re gonna say, where’s the audit trail? Where’s the, you know, data lineage, all that stuff? Where is it? I’ve got a chain of custody report. I’ve got the error report. I’ve done the reconciliation from every message. Like, all of that documentation is key, for legal and compliance because that gets you to I can now make a decision, the high level decision of getting rid of the legacy archive. Right. And I think also, I think, you know, to the heart of that is just, like, you can POC any of that stuff too. Right? You’re trying to convince these people, really, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum. If there are things they need to see in order to be comfortable, right, as you move on to an archive, as you scope out a migrate migration, those are all things you can look to test, validate, come comfortable with risk accepted as needed, and that kind of thing. Simon, I wanna make sure that we haven’t left out, you know, any phases in the planning that you would wanna, you know, you would wanna make sure any of these organizations covered. So it’s kind of what else would you address as as as, organizations plan, put together a road map, etcetera. Yeah. Look. A lot of good points were already touched. Excuse me. We’re already touched on. But I would add just a couple. The first one is, what was the use case that the original platform was put in place for, ultimately? And how how was that architected? How is it being used today? And, ultimately, how are you planning to use the new platform tomorrow? Because a big part of the transition from your existing platform into the new one is making sure that the data makes it over in a way that it’d be easy to consume in a similar fashion. And, ultimately, the way the use cases used to work in a lot of these legacy platforms don’t align with the way the use cases work today. So there is a huge amount of additional activity that needs to happen within the business around understanding that, educating users so that they’re comfortable with it. So that ultimately, you can deliver the right outcome. You know, the big difference between success and failure in these programs ultimately comes down to user experience that you need to make sure oh, excuse me. You need to make sure the user is at the center of that journey whilst the data is what’s important. It’s the way you engage with the data that ultimately matters. And so that’s gotta be the starting point. The other big piece is that we’re now at a point where these platforms have existed for twenty, if not thirty years. So in all likelihood, this is not the platform that the customer is in today is not the first one they were in. They, like, became from another platform and did migrations back when the the supporting technology that enabled it to happen was, arguably, less than product and more at all. And so there is a raft of additional issues that come with data that’s already been migrated once and potentially converted and all of the other components that come with that. And understanding that upfront ultimately, allows you to plan for it, and more importantly, put that information in front of people like Anthony and his team, so that they can help you, put a plan in place that can be signed off and, ultimately, get that acceptance of some of the errors that are likely to to come across early on in the program. But other than that, I think we we kinda covered a lot of those. We did go we did we did cover a lot. Well, can I ask you a quick question? Like, what is what is good reconciliation look like? Like, like like like real like, if if you’re looking to reconcile all these files, like, what what does that look like, and and what are people you know, what should people take into record into into consideration? Yeah. We typically look at it, in in a couple of different phases. The first one is looking directly at the source platform and getting an inventory of what’s in there on its own without using any third party tooling, what can you actually see from the platform itself? And then the second one is the migration tooling is going to interrogate all of that data and making sure that what you can see directly in the platform aligns to what the migration tooling has discovered. And then there’s the third piece, which is you’ve now moved the data to the new platform. Can you confirm that what you see in the migration tooling and what’s been reported by the migration tooling is actually happening is what’s arrived in the target platform. Ultimately, you you gotta do all three of those, steps so that you can be certain that you have consistency across the motion. And, you know, the a lot of the better products in in in the market, will give you unique identifiers that fit across that entire motion so you can track an item all the way from the source platform into your new platform. And that’s critical. Like, that’s the chain of custody, the data lineage that we’re talking about is that level of care has to be part of migration. My my the the the words that always freak me out when I talk to someone migrating is like, it’s just a lift and shift. That that is not there’s no such thing as a lift and shift. Is what you always say. Everyone loves to say it. No such thing. And I look. And I do think and and one of the reasons why this migration process is testing and validation. Right? So once it lands, someone has to do the testing and validation. I think Simon is absolutely right. You’ve gotta get your stakeholders to understand what the use cases are so they can start testing and seeing, you know, do my use case still work? And as you said, sometimes they have to be adjusted because the the platform’s different. Right? It’s it’s gonna be slightly different, but they have to feel comfortable. Right? The the stakeholders, whether it’s legal, compliance, surveillance, whoever’s involved in touching these archives have to be comfortable that the tool works. And then you’re also gonna be testing, does it look the same? You know, there’s I I it’s rare that I have a migration that when we start doing the testing validation, that there isn’t some anomaly. Like, particularly when it’s the older stuff, where some Guaranteed. Yeah. Guaranteed. Yeah. You’re they’re Nothing is here for something strange. You just have to figure it out. Right? It’s Right. What is it? You have to investigate it. Like, they don’t go smoothly. And this also goes to your your timing point. You know, I was told like, moving the data is the easy part. Right? Like you said, the tools are easy now. That’s easy. It’s the testing, the validation, understanding what it is, dealing with the anomalies, that takes a long time. And the last thing you want, which I know some clients like rush in, is you don’t wanna start a migration. You You don’t do the POC. You don’t do some of the early testing. Because what ends up happening, you migrate everything, and then you realize it was done wrong. Right? There was some weird thing in your data, and now you have to do it again. That doesn’t help anybody. So the testing and planning, I can’t emphasize enough how important that is because it doesn’t make it go faster just to move the data and then deal with it when it’s in the new archive. It doesn’t make it go faster. I know people like to think that it’s, you know, that two to three months of planning and really testing and all that stuff upfront, POC, doing that, makes a huge difference. Because then once everything is understood, and that includes things like reconciliation, like, in so one of the importance of the reconciliation is if you’re doing testing and, you know, you have your discovery team and they’re gonna say part of the validation is, I’m gonna do a search in the old legacy archive. I’m gonna do the same search in this archive, and I wanna see the numbers match. Makes sense. Right? They often don’t because of lots of issues. Right? It could be it could be the there was lots of errors or whatever it is. But you have to understand that if you don’t have that reconciliation, when they do that search, legal’s gonna say it does something’s wrong, and they’re not gonna sign off on it. And you have so if you have a reconciliation, they don’t have evidence too that they can point to to understand it if because at the end of the day, they have to you know, it’s attestation and sign off, right, as kind of the last step. Right? So at the end of the day, they need to sort of pack a document together that they could sign off on that’s not just yes or no. Right? Yeah. You know? And I think we gotta be aware of PMs who say this will be, you know, all done in three months. And also vendors who say, oh, don’t worry. This will be all be done in three months. Right? I think I think a good vendor understands these steps, understands that this is really complex, understands it takes a long time, and helps you document, and see through each of these stages. So question to you, Tom, right, who’s often in that seat. Right? How do you get all these different stakeholders aligned and informed throughout the project? How do you bring all these people together when they’re often siloed in the first place? Yeah. The the first thing is is to identify them. You know? Who are these people? Who’s gonna get involved? So it takes, you know, it it takes a lot of work with the the your stakeholders in there to really kinda dig in, understand who who all the different departments, who all the different people come together, and just make sure that everyone comes together early. Really, you know, starts to say, right. This is your ownership. You you need to help me and be accountable here. So a lot of, I suppose, the work with those, people and the stakeholders is making sure they’re aligned to the project. Really early on, buy into the project, and they all know what their their little gate is to sign off. They all know that, you know, Anthony said, you know, the risks. Nothing’s gonna be perfect here. You’re gonna have some challenges. How do we work together to partner to make sure we get over these, challenges? And I think it’s that visibility and examples and working as a partner to actually get through some of these really difficult stages. But I think Sure. Communication is the key. You know? Communicating all the time. And, of course, I always feel like there’s always, like, an outside counsel with, like, an AOL AOL address, but it was, like, a ton of influence on the whole project, and you wanna make sure you find them early, kind of get them across the whole thing. I think, well, it’s twenty twenty four, so I think I would be remiss if I if if I didn’t ask about AI. So, Simon, just from where you said across the tooling or or even just kind of looking beyond what what’s you know, what we’re capable of today. I mean, how do you see AI potentially impacting migrations, at any facet, you know, or at any stage of of of what we’ve talked about so far? At at the moment, it’s not something that’s really hit our radar from a set of requirements perspective. But what we are hearing a lot about is people looking to start archiving prompts ultimately and storing that long term. So it’s coming, but is there a path forward today, and how does that all look? Still a little bit of the unknown. There’s some workarounds that the jiggery can do to to kind of get some of that data stored, but still early days. I think the technology is absolutely moving faster than the supporting technology can keep up with at the moment. Right. I think the example I’ve seen, and and we’ve sort of bandied about a bit internally, is also how do we drive better insights across that data? I think thinking on, you know, the archive and what people are are are are looking to migrate, they actually often don’t have a lot of insight into what’s actually there, trends over time, that kind of thing. They’re so focused on the day to day, or but, typically, the function is so focused on the day to day and just ingestion and making sure everything’s in there. But what they know less about is how flows have changed over time across different elements of the business and and what have you, and how that can in turn kind of influence what that data could look like in a new archive. Right? And then, of course, there is a potential too that some of those new archives may be more have a more, forward foot when it comes to AI, and and there are sort of partnership opportunities, I think, to help them too. Right? I think one sort of, annoying thing about AI at the moment is just there’s so much noise, but I think one of the cool things is is really the opportunities to partner. Right? You have vendors who a lot of times have the tool sets, the know how. Right? But then you have customers and organizations who have the need and really understand these use cases, you know, and I think that’s why I’d encourage anyone. So partnering with vendors to really think about, okay. Well, let’s see. This doesn’t have to be what drives it, and maybe it’s a parallel thing. It’s not the full record, but maybe a way for us to evidence kind of where this is all going. And I think that’s a good place for me to ask you, Anthony, you know, what future trends do you see kind of influence in data migration strategies, you know, in the next three years, five year, you know, however you wanna take that. Yeah. I mean, look. I think I mean, one of the things that we’re seeing already, and I I’ve seen some charts now from clients who’ve analyzed the data that’s going in these archives. The amount of like, for the first time, I think, in in the past twenty five years, the amount of email is starting to go down, which is remarkable when you think about it. But the amount of I mean, and I know it’s hard for everybody because your mailbox is probably packed. So email is going down, but then things like Teams and and Bloomberg and all this other stuff is exploding. So Right. What what is in the archive is gonna be very different, I think, in the next five years, where email is and, you know, this is why I was talking about collaborative tools and the like. I don’t think it’s gonna be as clean as, you know, my it’s not an email archive. Right? It’s no longer just an email archive. It’s a messaging archive, and that’s becoming more and more true. With a lot of different data points. Right? Lot of different data points. Again, I go back to identity managers, one of the most important things in these archives. And, again, that’s critical when you start putting in all these new different types of electronic communications. The other trend we’re seeing is almost every application out there, whether it’s a trading application, a contract management application, they all have chat functions now. Right? And whether that has to be captured is something that legal appliance have to come up with, and they have to start with FINRA and SCC and the like. But if it does, again, it’s all different types of data that’s going in. So that, that, I think, is gonna be a big change. And I think, you know, as we talked about, you’re migrating this old data. Most of the old data, the really old data, is gonna be mostly email. So in some ways, that’s good. Obviously, there’s all different types of email. There’s obviously some, you know you know, some interest instant messaging and Bloomberg and the like. So that, I think, is gonna be a big change as people start thinking about, you know, even with a migration strategy, how do I how do I deal with all these different types of data? Because you’re gonna be validating. When we’re doing testing and validation, you have to look at all these different data types. Right? That’s part of your validation is making sure all the different data types that were migrated migrated correctly. Right? Email may be easy, but some of these other ones, a lot of these migration tools may not be as good with. So that’s definitely, an area that I think people are gonna be thinking about. And, look, frankly, that also is thinking about when you’re going into new tools and the like. You start talking about the contracts and the like. Like, given you know, it’s so hard to model what is the future gonna look like in the next five years if you’re doing a contract because no one knows data volumes, the types, what’s going in there. So it’s and you, you know, what do you usually do? You look historically. But as people keep saying, the change is coming, and it’s coming really fast. And I think that’s gonna be one of the challenges going forward is even just planning. What does my archive look like? How much data is gonna be in there? What do I think of data volumes are gonna be? No one really knows. I mean, it’s all guesswork right now because, you know, all we need is one ruling from, you know, the SEC or FINRA that says, hey. You know what? Because everyone’s doing Zoom and Teams meetings, now you have to capture them. They know they can be captured. They can, actually. It’s not that difficult to capture in these archives now. Like, that would be devastating. Good for good for the vendors because there’ll be lots of storage costs, but awful for for everyone else as you start thinking about putting that type of stuff in. And, look, I I I it’s totally a separate conversation and maybe even webinar. Like, it probably is coming at some point in some way. I mean, we don’t know to what degree, but but but but certainly, there will be some element of video or meetings that we consider. You know, the technology hasn’t caught up to how to kind of review it and and and and get through it quickly. But, you know, it it it’s certainly not inconceivable that, you know, few years from now, we’ll we’ll we’ll be storing and reviewing that contact. And I will tell you one of the concerns I have, like, when all these new things happen, right, is that legacy archive that’s sitting there to migrate is gonna be neglected. Right? Because no one’s gonna have time for it. Right? I mean, literally put this fire on. Based on what’s the new thing we’re capturing, testing that, and whatever. And if you decide to put that off, it literally is gonna die because no one’s gonna care about it except the regulators when they have an investigation. You want to go back that far. So I do think I mean, that’s a sort of a hidden cost, but that’s the thing that I worry about is we know there’s gonna be huge challenges in the next five years in terms of capturing and putting stuff in your archive and how we’re gonna do it. You can’t have this sitting there in the background. Again, it’s just risk that’s sitting there, and there’s not gonna be anybody who knows anything about it because the people that are being hired are thinking about how am I gonna capture AI? How am I gonna capture social media? How am I capturing this? And when someone says, well, how about, you know, the the two petabytes of data that we have sitting in this old archive, everyone’s gonna say, I don’t know anything about it. Like, that’s that’s gonna happen in five years. Let me let me jump in. I mean, it it it already happened today. That that’s right. Exactly. Already happens today. No one knows anything about it. It’s sitting there, and, yeah, it’s it’s bad. Yeah. I gotta stop saying Yep. Two two quick things and then kinda wrap this up with the, a a bow real quick. And and it’s been really, really substantive so far. I think one quick thing you touched on, Anthony, was just user experience. We haven’t really touched on that much, but and it’s obvious. Right? But for the end users of the archive and for the people using, those migration tools, the user experience is primary. Right? Especially as you’re bringing in those new channels, people’s ability to visualize, interrogate data points that they couldn’t in their legacy archive. That builds a relationship with that data in that new archive with the fact that it’s there, with these things that you might not have even been able to see in your new archive are now visible, searchable, etcetera. So I think just something to call out. I think, Tom, you’re not new to contracts. What’s some sort of fine print that can be a sticking point sometimes around support, end of life, that kind of thing in the exist you know, with the existing archive as someone looks to migrate. I wanna make sure we we we we adjust that before we end. Yeah. There’s no doubt. You know, the the challenges that you have with some of the legacy systems and some of the legacy vendors is the handcuffs. You know, there’s there’s contracts out there that at the moment, the large export fees to pull your data out. You know, we would say that vendors, we we need to change because change is continuous. So what’s great at the moment in five years’ time, Anthony said earlier, there’s the new thing that’s gonna come, the new technology, the new communication tools. So there is always gonna be that transformation, that data moving. So vendors like us need to make it simple that, you know, if there is a new technology, a new tool, hopefully, you know, Shield is one of those, but you never know. It it shouldn’t lock you in. You shouldn’t be handcuffing the client’s data. It’s their data. So a lot of what we see in the existing contracts that are out there are some of these handcuffs and these controls. You know, what we look to do is work with those clients and these prospects to see how they can work with that existing vendor, to see how they can get their hands on their own data. One of the, you know, areas that we we put into our contracts is the data is your data. If you want it out at the end of it, it’s your data. There’s no cost. Here we go. And I think that’s really important for people to look at those contracts as they go into this, you know, then then migration, then new next new vendor. You know, how much control do I have on accessing my data? How are you gonna So I think support is a key one too. Yeah. Okay. So I think we got five minutes left. If anyone wants to ask a question, this is your last chance. But, otherwise, I think, Simon, you talked about just, you know, the astounding amount of kind of, migrations and the like you have done. But just tell us about a success story, like, and if, anyway, if we have time, maybe we’ll do another one. But but but tell us about, just a success story that you were able to kinda help, with. Yeah. No problems. So, actually, it was one that we ended up collaborating with Reed Smith on not not that long ago, where we were doing work for a, a global investment bank. And one of the decisions that that was collectively made early on was to bring both their outside counsel in as well as their auditors in right from the get go. And that ultimately set us up to fix that because there was very clearly defined roles and responsibilities. We had clearly mapped out how we were going to approach it to meet what were, at times, quite challenging demands in terms of information that that both, council the council wanted and the auditors wanted and the way they wanted to present it better. But had we not done that upfront, I think we probably would have spent a year at the end of the program just trying to produce all of the necessary reporting. So I think that was a a really big one. And and and another big part of that that really set us up for success was having very clearly defined use cases. And and those use cases were both from a user experience perspective because there was a bunch of end user facing data in those archives that needed to be that they needed to maintain access to. But as well as, I think there was three or four different categories of data that needed to move to different platforms, be packaged in different ways, as well as, needed a different appropriate supporting reporting as to how it was packaged, why it was packaged that way, how the users were selected, etcetera. That, meant that we nailed it earlier on enough in the program that we could really start to push data at a rapid pace. And when I say push at a rapid pace, I think there was a there was a a week long period where we push just shy of, I think it was ninety terabytes, to the cloud, which is somewhat unheard of when you’re coming out of legacy archive platforms. So it it was it was immense, and it was incredibly successful. We’re talking about, if you look at, you know, this typical way we look at data success is if it’s readable and accessible in the source platform and it’s supported by the target platform, we should be able to migrate it. And the numbers that we hit were, like, ninety nine point nine nine nine something percent. It was, like, unheard of levels of tick that were great. Right. Look. I I love that example because I hear so much of what we’ve talked about today. Right? I hear a lot of complexity. I hear a lot of size. Right? But I hear people working together, the right people being identified coming together early, and then I hear really that data being validated sort of and understood where I was going to sort of at each stage of the migration. Anthony, any final thoughts just to kinda wrap this up? Yeah. No. And look. I’ll I’ll follow-up what Simon said. I think, to me, what made that particularly successful is the petabytes of messaging data that we got rid of. Right? And this is a an organization that had lots of legal holds, lots of regulatory scrutiny. But because we did it the right way, we got legal to sign off on deleting tons I mean, there’s many, many different archives all over the world. There are we got rid of all of it. I mean, an entire environment was was, you know, gotten rid of, and now they’re modern. Right? Now they’re in a modern archive, and they can manage that data better. And it was incredibly complex. But if you do it right, you get the success. And that to me, that’s that’s a that was a huge success for that reason. That’s great. Well, look. Thank you, everyone so much for your time. Thank you everyone listening so much for listening. I really enjoyed this conversation. I thought it was really meaningful. I think this is sort of a, like I said at the top, just a a a topic that I think needs to be talked about more, not just by us, but I think everyone. Right? I think because it’s the only way we’re gonna make these moves. Right? So, so thank you everyone for your time, and have a lovely rest of your day. Thank you. Thanks, everyone.