Information Technology

Google cloud migration nears its successful completion

The IT team is coming to a close on the final phase of the Google cloud migration. The first stage was our exchange to Gmail migration which transferred successfully across the board. Most of the team has adjusted well and been receptive to the change. The reasoning behind this first phase of the migration was to cut maintenance costs, and to protect us from spam, viruses, and other cyber attacks.

Phase Two is migrating our file shares from our on-premise Athena server over to Google cloud. The reasoning behind migrating was for the same reasons as the Gmail migration: less money the town has to spend long term in maintaining and buying equipment every 5 - 10 years, and less vulnerability to ransomware attacks which have increased over the past couple years. In addition to continuous backups of our data, Google cloud also gives us the ability to collaborate simultaneously on documents. Most importantly the ability to access files from a remote location gives us the freedom to work remotely if another pandemic ever occurs.

The IT team is happy with the migration and the SADA Google team that has been fully involved with the migration from start to finish and we would like to thank them for their expertise. We would also like to thank you, the users, for being patient during this migration process and receptive to this big change.

In the weeks to follow the IT team will be offering a brief training to the users who need it and will also be making office visits to each department to ensure that there are no problems and everyone’s expectations are met.

Regards,

IT Team

STEPS TO SUCCESS:

• Environment scans of our existing shares to ensure all files can be migrated.

• Setup migration servers and workstations (on premise equipment and virtuals) for the migration process.

• Run a second round of environment scans and start the migration process.

• Upon scan completion, start the Delta batches to ensure the files on the old

Athena shares match exactly to the new

Google shares. (current stage)

• Assign user permissions to the new Google shares and remove user permissions to the old Athena shares.

• Remove old Athena shares and fully start utilizing the new Google shares for all users.

• Google share training for users