Introduction
Ricardo Rivera, a Migration Engineer at HiView, has been with us since the very beginning and has played a key role in the company’s evolution. In this interview, one of our co-founders, Miles Hischier, sat down with Ricardo to talk about his role and how he helps the growing success we have with clients.
Interview Q&A
Q. What are the key steps involved in a Google Workspace migration?
A. “Key steps involving discovery, that’s the very first step that we take. Then planning, environment preparation, data migration, which this consists in two phases, bulk migration and then Delta migrations… we have the user onboarding and training. Then finally, we do a cutover activity to transition everyone over to the new accounts.”
Q. How do you ensure minimal disruption during the transition for clients?
A. “We prepare for the transition, communicating to the main stakeholders on the company and also to end users that the change is coming… We deliver training to those end user accounts. Also, we train all the super admin accounts that will be in charge of handling the destination Google Workspace account at the end…We make sure that the client provides us with the specific user mapping that we can use to transition everyone…; and also that we don’t have anyone logged in on their accounts to prevent anyone from using it while the transition is in progress.”
Q. What are the most common challenges organizations face during migration?
A. “Challenges include managing large data volumes, complexity, end user adoption, handling third-party applications… For example, if we are migrating a user from Workspace to Workspace, they have these many integrations that they use to sign in that sell… Then maintaining data integrity and security, and also meeting various compliance requirements like Google Vault or HIPAA compliance, for example.”
Q. What tools or methods do we use to streamline the migration process?
A. “These tools are mostly third party tools… We use cloudM mostly to bring all those files, emails, calendar contacts, everything from the source environments to Google Workspace. We also use a very nice tool,…Google Apps Manager, which help us to complete some of the major activities in Google Workspace with bulk operations. For example, to create multiple groups,…aliases,…share drives. In the Admin Console, it’s not that easy to create… But with this tool and automation tools that we use, it’s very easy to complete.”
Q. What kind of support does HiView provide after the migration is complete?
A. “So we provide a post-migration support. So we provide dedicated post-migration support to quickly resolve any unforeseen issues and ensure a smooth handover to the client’s IT Department.”
Full Interview
Note from Interviewer (Miles Hischier):
Ricardo has been instrumental in hundreds of successful client engagements. To learn more about how Ricardo and our team can support you, watch the full interview below or on our YouTube Channel, or feel free to contact us directly through our website.
