Harvey Mudd College
University Profile
Harvey Mudd College is a privately held residential undergraduate science and engineering school located in Claremont, California. It is one of the contiguous Claremont Colleges institutions which share adjoining campus grounds. HMC shares university resources such as libraries, dining halls, health services, and campus security with the other Claremont Colleges. However, each college is independent, with its own faculty, a board of trustees, endowment, and admissions procedures.
Migrate to Google Drive and SharePoint to Save Costs
Business Drivers
To save on costs, Harvey Mudd College planned to retire its on-premises storage system and move to cloud storage. This way, HMC would no longer have to worry about continuously spending money on hardware and maintenance costs, not to mention that their content would also become more streamlined too. While they had considered Box, HMC already had Google Drive and SharePoint Online, so moving to cloud storage seemed like an obvious choice.
Harvey Mudd College was eager to migrate to Google Drive and SharePoint Online, so they stopped creating new personal files for staff and students and got started.
Disparate Permissions Between NFS and Google Drive
The Problem
While planning out their cloud migration of 6TB, Harvey Mudd’s IT team began to realize maintaining permissions and file fidelity from on-prem to Google and SharePoint Online might pose some challenges. Their existing permissions were disorganized, and because they also did not “clean up” their content beforehand, the migration was beginning to look quite messy.
But the IT team persisted through the migration project, only to encounter another hurdle – the shared data environment kept changing even as they were trying to move to the cloud. As a result, this messy migration became even messier.
Cloud Migration Flexibility and Agility
The Solution
Harvey Mudd College’s IT team needed a migration tool to help them manage their content environment at the same time. After some research, their Cloud Systems Specialist found a migration tool that could maintain the file attributes just like they needed. Additionally, it was compatible with on-premises storage, Google Cloud, and SharePoint Online, making it a win-win for Harvey Mudd College. The migration software was even a preferred partner of Internet2, enabling Harvey Mudd to take advantage of special pricing.
In the end, Harvey Mudd College’s students and staff have much more convenience with their content, and can even access it on mobile devices. Their file permissions are now much easier to manage, and HMC has access to a tool flexible enough to handle any changes they may want to make in the future.
Moving Campus to the Cloud: Common “Gotchas” and Best Practices for Migrating Large Datasets
Want to know more about exactly how Harvey Mudd College completed its migration to Google Drive and SharePoint Online? Hear from them (and the University of Miami) directly in this on-demand webinar here.
