Forbes completes successful Google Drive migration in 10 days

Customer Profile

Forbes is a global media brand known for its bi-weekly business magazine. The organization champions entrepreneurial success by convening and curating influential leaders who are driving change, transforming business, and making a significant impact on the world. Forbes reaches 120 million people worldwide through its print product, live events, and marketing programs across 70 countries.

Business Drivers

As a way to save costs and eliminate redundancy, Forbes moved to consolidate all of its departments onto Google Drive for cloud storage and collaboration. Previously, the organization deployed Google Drive as well as another cloud storage service. As part of this consolidation, Forbes needed to migrate 15 TB of content to Google Drive.

The Challenge

Google Drive Migration

By the time Forbes decided to eliminate their extra cloud storage platform, they had just under three months to move their content or risk paying for a renewal. “We didn’t think the migration would be too difficult for us to manage, so at first our IT team decided to try and move the content ourselves,” said Chris LaBianca, Director of Business Systems at Forbes. “We planned to start with our most important folders and work backward from there.”

Forbes initially employed a DIY migration method: manually downloading their files from the original cloud platform and re-uploading them to Google Drive.

However, it did not take long for Forbes to realize that this do-it-yourself migration approach was not ideal. “The very first folder we attempted to migrate took us about two weeks,” LaBianca said. “We knew at that point that there was no way we were going to get our migration done on time.”

With their migration deadline looming, Forbes decided to rethink their approach to their Google Drive migration.

We were shocked and happy that we were able to complete our Google Drive migration on deadline. DryvIQ was incredibly responsive and truly delivered on their promise.
Chris LaBianca, Director of Business Systems
Forbes

The Solution

After some exploration, Forbes discovered DryvIQ as a solution to transfer files across cloud storage systems. But by that point, the clock was truly ticking; Forbes had even reached out to their cloud vendor to see if a temporary extension was an option for them, instead of a year-long renewal.

“By the time we discovered DryvIQ, we had 10 days left to complete our migration before we were up for renewal,” LaBianca said. “DryvIQ assured us we could hit the deadline, so we did not do any additional research for other migration tools.”

But despite DryvIQ’s assurances, Forbes still had doubts that the migration would be completed in time.

“Even as we moved forward with the migration, we were preparing for the worst – how would we explain to our employees why they were locked out of their storage accounts?” LaBianca said. “We took a leap of faith with DryvIQ.”

The Results

Once the project launched, DryvIQ’s Client Solutions team kicked it into high gear to configure the platform and migrate the content to Google Drive quickly and transparently. Since DryvIQ streams files directly from the source to the destination, there was no downloading and reuploading of the content required, and the platform preserved all file fidelity and user information in the migration.

“For us, the biggest drivers behind this project were speed and ensuring that our file structures stayed the same so that our employees did not have any issues with the transition,” LaBianca said. “And this project could not have gone any better.”

With the help of DryvIQ, Forbes was able to easily migrate its 325 users and 15TB of content to Google Drive in 10 days –  avoiding costly renewal fees and user disruption. Now everyone in the organization can collaborate seamlessly with Google Drive.

“We were shocked and happy that we were able to complete our Google Drive migration on deadline,” LaBianca said. “The DryvIQ team was incredibly responsive and truly delivered on their promise.”

 

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