Today’s enterprise organisations face an escalating problem. As the use of laptops, tablets and smartphones continues to grow, the amount of data created and stored on these endpoint devices is increasing at pace.

In fact, typically half of an organisation’s business data is now stored on these 'endpoints,' and away from the traditional domain of the centralised corporate data centre.

As workplace mobility continues to grow, new software, operating systems and regular firmware rollouts have had to match pace to keep up with end-user expectations.

This constant need to upgrade the user experience has become a strategic nightmare for the IT department to manage—especially as valuable enterprise data now shifts from device to device, and platform to platform. Endpoint data is more vulnerable to loss as a result of the frequency of operating system (OS) migrations and technology refreshes.

In fact, IT departments spend significant amounts of time and money each year migrating data onto new devices. On average, organisations typically replace 25-30% of their client devices annually.

This means that for routine replacements due to losses, failure and planned migrations, an organisation with 10,000 devices could be faced with 3,000 time-consuming and disruptive migration processes to deal with in a mere 12 month period – roughly eight a day. It becomes easy to see why, when handled incorrectly, this process is a drain on resources and how it can waste the time of employees whose devices undergo the process.

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It is best practice to ensure files are continuously and automatically backed up prior to undertaking data migration. Doing so eliminates the hassle involved with the process, and saves the time and money that would otherwise be associated with replacing workstations and laptops.

Some endpoint data protection platforms allow individuals to easily carry out their own migrations, free from the intervention of the IT department. This self-service approach means employees migrate data when it works for them, and they’re back up and running in mere minutes – as opposed to leaving their devices with the IT department for a few days, if not weeks.

Ease the pressure with worry-free data migration

In order to avoid an inefficient and costly data migration process, companies must first identify their endpoint backup needs and ensure they are met. To do so requires evaluation of a range of factors, including the quantity of data that needs to be stored, the location for this storage and the duration of the process. Other critical factors to consider include the time available for a backup, how to preserve the integrity of the stored data, and whether the implemented system is scalable.

In many organisations, requests for file restore assistance may sit unaddressed for several days due to overstretched IT departments or a lack of resources. However, the pressure caused by these types of situations can be eased without increasing overheads. Instead, enterprise users should be empowered to quickly and easily restore their own data whenever necessary.

This serves the dual purpose of making the IT teams’ lives easier, whilst freeing them up to concentrate on projects that add real business value.

A better path to workstation and laptop migration

So what does an effective, efficient migration process look like? In the past, the IT department would roll out upgrades in a series of waves, which had the tendency to frustrate users. By ensuring files are first automatically and transparently backed up, the most recent version of employees’ work can quickly be restored to new devices.

The result is a streamlined, simplified operation where desktop support focuses on the migration process itself rather than troubleshooting backup — all the while keeping the end-user experience intact, and reducing IT costs associated with migration significantly.

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It really is crucial to implement a comprehensive endpoint backup solution before undertaking and implementing a data migration process. Without it, your company is wasting time and money, not to mention risking an expensive disaster recovery process.

Correct implementation should protect everyone in the enterprise, regardless of the number of users or their physical location. It should run quietly in the background, allowing users to continue to work, and it should be transparent: they should remain unaware that a backup is even occurring. Also, the knowledge that restoring a file is only a few clicks away means that users are often happy to restore data themselves; a ‘golden win’ for the IT department.

Sourced from by Andy Hardy, EMEA Managing Director at Code42