Sync ‘n’ share provider Box Inc. wants its customers to migrate even more of their data to the cloud with Box Shuttle, a new hybrid software and consulting service that’s just gone into beta.

Box Shuttle is designed to help companies that are struggling to efficiently move large masses of data into Box. Up until now, companies have had to struggle by themselves to shift large amounts of data from network file share or legacy content management systems into Box. Obviously, this was never an easy undertaking, particular for companies that had to contend with usage permissions, metadate, retention policies and other concerns. There was also the problem of mapping such data in a logical way, because no two content management systems work in exactly the same way.

“Many businesses that are anxious to adopt cloud technology choose the “lift-and-shift” approach, which has them transfer files over the public internet from on-premise servers to a cloud service and replicate their same in-house applications in the cloud,” said Tim Smith, vice president of consulting at Box. “While at first glance this sounds like an effective model, “lift-and-shift” fails to capture the advantages that come with native cloud features.”

Looking at the problem, Box quickly realized that software algorithms alone would never solve the problem. Hence, the company decided the best way to tackle it was to create a hybrid software-human service to help enterprises content with the myriad issues that concern migration planning and file system organization. The service is geared towards large companies that want to rely less on their own IT infrastructure for storage, and seems to be more about customer retention than attracting new users. Box already boasts numerous Fortune 500 customers including the Coca Cola Company, General Electric, Pfizer and Eli Lilly, and it wants to keep them at all costs.

For customers who’re looking to move more of their content to the cloud, Box Shuttle should be a very useful service, and one that should help deepen the company’s relationship with its customers.

We should make clear that Box Shuttle is not the same as Amazon Web Services’ Snowball offering, which is a piece of hardware that Amazon ships out to companies directly so they can upload data and send it back to the cloud giant. In an interview with VentureBeat, Box CEO Aaron Levie said Box isn’t planning anything like that at this stage, though he didn’t rule out the possibility that customers might one day be able to use Snowball, and then port that data from AWS S3 to Box.

Pricing for Box Shuttle starts at $2,000 for the most basic data migrations, and increases depending on the level of complexity. The service launches is beta today, with general availability planned for later this fall.

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