Microsoft acquires Mover.io to ease OneDrive migrations

Microsoft plans to add cloud migration tools to aid SharePoint on-premises migrations to the OneDrive cloud with its Monday acquisition of Mover.io, an eight-year-old Canadian startup specializing in the self-service mass migration of enterprise files.

Mover.io, acquired for an undisclosed sum, also provides cross-cloud migrations from a dozen OneDrive file-sharing cloud competitors, including Box, Dropbox, Egnyte and Google Drive. Microsoft continues to support SharePoint on-premises, but the company has not said how long it will continue to do so, leaving room for speculation among users and experts.

Mover.io, acquired a month after Microsoft bought data-migration vendor Movere, will join several file-migration tools and services already on the Microsoft cloud platform, including FastTrack and the SharePoint Migration Tool. Users also have a choice of several other third-party tools to do the job, including ShareGate and Metalogix, which support file migrations to OneDrive.

Microsoft could, theoretically, poach customers from competing cloud file-management systems such as Box with the Mover.io migration tools. But the real OneDrive migration target customer for the Mover.io tools is Microsoft's SharePoint on-premises base, said Deep Analysis founder Alan Pelz-Sharpe.

Enterprise-scale file migrations from on-premises servers to the cloud pose challenges of maintaining file directory structure as well as access and security policies, Pelz-Sharpe said. SharePoint enterprise migrations in particular can be even thornier because it was designed for front-line office workers to set up ad-hoc file-sharing sites with little IT assistance.

The fact that SharePoint's been around for nearly two decades, pre-dating widespread cloud adoption, compounds the issue. Pelz-Sharpe described one of his clients, a utility company, whose SharePoint on-premises footprint has grown over the years to 12,000 SharePoint sites.

"They have no idea what is in them, and no idea what to do with them," Pelz-Sharpe said. "These things can be complex. It's a recognized problem, so the more experience, skills and tools Microsoft can bring to help, the better."

Specifics about Mover.io features integrating with the Microsoft 365 platform will come next month, said Jeff Teper, Microsoft corporate VP for Office, SharePoint and OneDrive, in a blog post announcing the acquisition.