#1 We are in a cybersecurity arms race

Microsoft has finally done it. They pulled the security (or lack of security) band-aid off and for some it stung. The deprecation of Basic Authentication should be no surprise to anyone that has been paying attention in recent years. The inherent vulnerability of Basic Auth by sending your username and password through the internet was flawed when it was proposed in the last century. The struggle for a user to keep their data private while the black-hat hacker uses every available trick to steal said data for profit continue to plague all of us.  Using various combinations social and computer engineering to separate information from its rightful owner, anytime there is money to be made from stealing information we will have this issue. Multi-factor or 2 factor authentication has been made the standard for all of Microsoft’s tenants. Two factor authentication is not the last word in keeping your data safe, but it is a good next step in the cybersecurity arms race.

#2 Mergers and Acquisitions will continue to be strong

In 2021 we saw the global Mergers and Acquisitions market hit an all-time peak. By those levels 2022 didn’t quite hit the same size and number of deals, however it still saw a steady volume matching prepandemic activity. The technology, media, and telecommunications sector continue to be the dominant force for investments. With the current volatility of other markets, it would seem like many investors are guarding their money a little more cautiously. However, Private Equity (PE) firms invested $2 trillion in 2021 and they were on track to outpace that in 2022. M&A activity isn’t going anywhere, even if the world falls into some version of recession. People will still see opportunities in undervalued products and companies to take the leap and acquire or merge with them.

#3 No API love between competitors

If email were invented today, there would be no common protocol you could use to easily move mailboxes from one place to another. Every organization would have their own version and their own API. Earlier this year Atlassian announced pricing changes that would take effect the following month, increasing their subscriptions for Standard, Premium and Enterprise by ~5%. This increase coupled with a discontinuation of the non-cloud on premise server option left many Confluence and Jira customers looking for alternatives. Here’s the difficult truth, there’s currently no way to transfer your Atlassian data to a different platform. APIs don’t communicate between platforms and removing one piece of your Atlassian data puzzle is like trying to get that one Jenga piece out during a game then having the whole system fall down.

#4 The secret to success

A famous quote attributed to Woody Allen goes something like “Eighty percent of success is showing up”. There are many variants of the sentiment including one attributed to Thomas Eddison “ninety percent of a man’s success in business is perspiration.” Here at BitTitan we have similar feelings about performing a successful migration. Our most valuable advice would be “95% of migration success is a doing your prep work before the cutover”. A great analogy along these lines is to compare a migration to painting a house. Painting the house is actually the easy part. Prepping the house i.e., taping and masking is the tedious piece that makes painting a very straightforward and easier job.

#5 There will be more data tomorrow than there is today

Just like rising inflation and diminishing purchasing power of our currency. The amount of data we all have is growing. Not only is there a lot of data but also for compliance reasons it sometimes needs to be stored for years. Managing and migrating Gigabytes, Terabytes and Petabytes of data can be a huge endeavor for IT teams. For this reason, tools like MigrationWiz are crucial in helping IT staff and Managed Service Providers in merging, moving, or divesting that data from one place to another. Using the proper tool for the job can be the difference between a good day at work or a really frustrating one.

Happy New Year from all of us at BitTitan, we are optimistic the new year will bring more migrations opportunities and more hurdles to jump. We are prepared for what lays ahead in 2023. We also have exciting product news to announce in the months ahead. Stay tuned for great things to come.