Counting the Cost: What You Need to Know About Email Migration Costs

Choosing to pull the trigger on an email migration isn’t easy. It’s a pretty big endeavor and can even cost quite a bit. While all of this is true, it’s also a move that can have massive positive impacts on your business and can streamline your workflow immensely while not having noticeable negative impacts on your employees as they don’t have to get used to massive changes and can simply keep doing what they already have been doing this entire time.

Today we’ll take a closer look at the cost of email migrations, what can affect this, and of course how to strike a balance between cost and quality. Let’s take a look at a few of the things that can impact costs.

Migration Scope

The main thing that will affect the cost is the scope. This includes things such as what kind of email data will be moved, the size of the new mailbox, the number of users which need to be transferred, and a few more things.

This covers pretty much the basic info for the migration and all can’t really be affected too much. You can’t really lower any of these too much, the number of people to be migrated is pretty much static and the others can’t really be affected too much without taking heavy risks. It’s important to understand that these numbers can’t really be manipulated much, but they aren’t the only factor.

Migration Method

While the previous factors were pretty much set in stone, you have a lot more freedom of choice here. For the most part, the choice boils down to how much you’re willing to pay for extra quality-of-life features and support.

You can choose between automated and manual, the former will make things far easier, but if you think you can pull off the latter option then it is an option to save money. There is also the choice of self-service vs. full-service. Once again, if you believe that self-service won’t cause you issues down the line then this is another choice where you can end up saving a bit of cash and investing it elsewhere. You could also try something as the Coherence Active Directory Migration Services which would cover all bases!

Licensing Costs

It’s important to understand that a large portion of the costs will come from getting licensing for the actual software you intend to use. If you wish to legally use the new email software then you will of course need to pay for a software license and user licenses for the devices themselves. Depending on the size of your company these costs can amount to quite a bit, but in general migration costs will quickly scale up based on the size of your company and this should be something that you are already expecting once you consider cloud migration.

Consulting Fees

These aren’t generally that large but they are still worth mentioning. Most of the service providers will charge some sort of fee for consultations before you actually decide to purchase the service and while you talk with them to try and figure out how things will work and if they are the correct option for you.

These costs will likely be a token amount in comparison to the final price, but it’s still another number to add to the pile and something that will need to be explained to the higher-ups. While the consultations do cost some amount of cash, they are incredibly helpful and important so they shouldn’t be skipped if possible.

Configuration and Setup

A large chunk of the cost for the actual move will come from the price that the company charges for configuring and setting everything up for you. As this will likely take a lot of man-hours for them you can expect a solid price tag. People aren’t cheap, and people who are skilled at migrations and can do them quickly and/or seamlessly are even more pricey. Of course, if you decide to do this part yourself you can save some money, but you run the risk of messing things up and wasting time, which also translates into lost money, thus defeating the cost of trying to save it in the first place.

Conclusion

There are an incredible number of things that go into the cost of this procedure, far too many to list any reasonable amount of text, but we hope that we’ve helped you understand some of the main ones and hopefully allow you to not only better choose the correct service for yourself, but also potentially save a bit of money wherever it’s possible.