Judgement day - are you ready to make the the change in organizational culture, management and infrastucture

The Truth - does it looks familiar?

You cannot hide it.......
You cannot run away from it.....
You cannot forgot it....
You cannot be compliace without doing it...      
You cannot leave it behind..... 
You have dublicates from it....
You have it in multiple storage (file server, email, backup (email & file server)

You have known it!
You have accepted it!
You have been too nice!
You dont want to disturb your end users...
You don't know who owns it?
You have migrated it without any clean up action multiple time!
You are paying from it?

Part of it does not have any value anymore!
Part of it should be saved to somewhere else, the right place!
It is growing more faster...
It is changing the format and requiring more storage..
It increses your cost for nothing -- more hardware...
It, unvaluable is located in SAN storage behind high available setup (controllers and disk cabins)
It has always been transition during hardware upgrade...
We have not  really questioned it why we migrate all...
We have used both copy and move to migrate the data (Last modify date older than create time stamp)..

You have lacked of policies and governance...
You have lacked of tracking and automation...
You have no BYOD view....
You have not communicated...

IN THE FUTURE YOU MUST KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE...
IN THE FUTURE YOU MUST BE ABLE TO SHOW WHAT YOU HAVE OR NOT...
IN THE FUTURE YOU ARE ACCOUNTABLE.....
and
IN THE FUTURE THERE IS A RISK FOR A ADMINISTRATIVE FEE IF NOT DOING ANYTHING


and for sure, you don't know what you have in your file servers 🙈🙉🙊
 

There is no escape except shape up, make decission and pay the bill, it's pay day - from your old legacy data I mean. It is a risk of deleting or keeping data

Nevertheless of  the decissions, business cannot expect IT to make the clean up decissions for the data owned by the business. IT is a enabler, responsible from the old and new platform aligned with organizations digital workplace and digitalization strategy - how  organization will work in the future world.

Business cannot delegate or ask the IT to delete the old data, instead business should start clean up process to delete the old data and together with IT think the user profiles, governance, metadata, retention and e.g. understand from where the unstructured data is coming.

So deleteting data from 2003 now without any changes for the future does not fix anyting while it does not drive the change.

You can expect to to have more questions than answers and to all questions you cannot find the information in reasonable cost, and it is more to identify the risks, make a decission and execute.

Starting is actually not so difficult but you can spent all time available to discuss and try to fine world hugging solution and ensure that all exceptions is taking care before you start the migration. But still you will find solution and user scenarious witch you have not been able think or even more identify, like broken inheritance at the ACL level, Access / Excel files in file share with only link in user desktop etc...

So for the beginning witch you should start regardeless if you have defined the target or not is to:

0. Get commiment from both business and IT.

Without clear commitment and statement from the business, this will be agaiin one IT driven try / attempt with no clear impact except cost only.
Business' role here is critical to understand the pros and cons and impacts of the decissions while selecting this or that there is concequence  from the decissions. It can be final while we need to create something valuable what was deleted or administrative fee based on the EU GDPR starting from May 2018 or risks where user makes syncronization possible from organization data using OneDrive for Business to to their personal, consumer OneDrive for purpose or accidentally.
Discuss with your CISO and Data Protection Officer to get their view to support the decissions, and DOCUMENT THE DECISSIONS with signature to show the selected activities.

One key here is to get approval for transformation and not transition only, while without transformation there will be no change in behaviour, only lift and sift like moving data from Windows 2008 file cluster in EMC storage to Windows 2016 in NetApp Storage. Only new cost.

1. Communication plan

Create communication plan explaining why this must be done and making the work meaninful. Involve the end user to clean up activities through gamification with awards (expect to get technical limitations and Access Denied issues when collecting amount of files and total size of users personal folder as and example)
Prepare your self to get resitance and negative feedback and how to resolve and answer to those to change to attitude to right direction.
Leave some room for ad-hoc communication while all the user scenarious are not know but be ready to responce in timely manner.

You cannot success without right communication.

  2. Share and find the owner

List all servers with share name and ACL's in the share level --> try to avoid opening the discussion from folder level ACL's unless you unlimited budget (in that case pls call me).
Parallel run the scripts to find unwanted file formats like movies, files with illegal characters and if migraton target is SharePoint also to identify possible files with long url risk (combination of basic URL and migrated data path)
One observation also has been how easily it is to find from the data mass when the last server upgrade has been done. You can find thousands or hundred thousands file with same creation time stamp like 23.7.2005 were the last write time stamp can be earlier like 2.3.2002 or later 3.10.2016
You might also found ACL with SID number string instead of group name what might be  SID history or deleted group, forgot to delete from share too.

Also check if Last Accessed time stamp available, there, if remember correctly can be some changes in different Windows Version how they handle the last access time stamp. (use Google)

Make the list available and editable in SharePoint Online or On premise, where you can use the SharePoint features to automate and collect data from multiple users parallel. At the minimum you should have:

• Country/Location - if not able to identify from the server name
• Server name
• Share name
• ACL's from the share level (assume everyone or domain users with full controll at the share level)
• Responsible IT person (known person)
• Owner(-s) of the share (when local IT has found must added here)
• Normal status (Not started, Work In Progress WIP, Completed, Closed, Pending)
• Share type (application, project, departement, local, temporary, personal....) 
• Secure must be protected and cannot be migrated to cloud (Yes / No)
• Free comments / Notes

 If targets and migration approach has been selected then to same list can be added

• Target (SharePoint Online, On premise DC, Backup, Azure File Server, delete...)
• Migrate (all, from year xxxx to zzzz)

To get answers to the basic question will be challenging and requires on going management and support to local resource and also communication with hosting partner to resolve all ACL based issues.

When done, you should have better understanding of what you have who is the owner and also might been able to identify mismatch in security level like user based ACL's or wrong group added with full access. Usually one question is that does Local Administrors or Domain Admins require the access to file shares owned by business. Question is good but for me on observation would the usage of domain admins group while part of the Local administrators group already. So lots of valuable data showing the behaviour from the history.

Gentlemen, Start your engine.

More coming later

All are my personal opinions

My first car was like this Toyota Crown Wagon fromyear 1966-67 and I was 15 years old only. I bought it while couldn't by a  motor bike - thank's to my mom :-)

Toyota Crown Station Wagon