Cloud content management provider Box Inc. is trying to welcome more enterprises into its fold by making its Box Shuttle migration tools more widely available.

Box Shuttle, the company’s paid migration service, gives enterprises an easy way to move large amounts of content, together with its permissions and metadata, into the Box Content Cloud from legacy systems. The service has been around since 2016 but recently underwent a major revamp. It covers the entire migration operation, including planning and strategy, content analysis, lifecycle assessment, permission and attribute management, and the migration itself, to ensure enterprise’s data can be moved safely.

Tamar Bercovici, Box Core Content vice president of engineering, said in a blog post today that Box uses some pretty advanced technology when it plans migrations for customers. That technology is now being made available to customers, free of charge in some limited cases, via a new Box Shuttle self-service offering.

“Moving to the cloud has been a priority for many organizations, but the path has been difficult, and the cost and complexity of migrating content has been a huge roadblock,” Bercovici said.

Box’s new offering is meant to remove the cost barrier to cloud migrations. For organizations with relatively small amounts of content, ten terabytes or less, Bercovici said they can now use the Box Shuttle tools entirely free of charge, so long as their data meets certain conditions.

The conditions are fairly restrictive, but they probably won’t be insurmountable for everyone. For example, Box will only enable migration of network share files, FTP, OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox and SharePoint Online data.

Also, that content can only contain simple metadata, such as file and folder names and the dates that it was created and modified. If the content meets those conditions, enterprises are free to use the Box Shuttle self-service tools and get started moving it right away, Bercovici said.

For more complex self-service content migrations, Box has a pretty reasonable offer on the table though. Bercovici said the Box Shuttle self-service tools can be used to move larger amounts of data that has even more complex requirements.

Examples include content that needs re-platforming when its moved into Box, is tied to custom metadata that’s used in critical business processes or requires granular permissions re-mapping. Box Shuttle’s advanced tooling is priced at $500 per terabyte, said Bercovici, who claimed that’s about 75% more affordable than similar migration tools.

For that price, Box will enable content to be migrated from additional sources, including SharePoint On-Premises deployments, Citrix Sharefile, Egnytes, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. The tools enable folder-level permissions re-mapping, with case-by-case midflight editing in the event of incompatibilities, and content can contain custom metadata such as document types, retention dates and application IDs.

The traditional Box Shuttle migration service is still available for organizations that would rather not attempt such things themselves. In fact, there are now two different offerings.

First is Box Shuttle managed services, which provides hands-on execution where its experts work hand-in-hand with customers to guarantee a successful migration of any size. Then there’s the new Box Shuttle enablement services, which entails training and planning to give customers the confidence to use the Box Shuttle self-service tools.

Analyst Holger Mueller of Constellation Research Inc. told SiliconANGLE that Box needs better migration tools to get more enterprises to adopt its cloud products.

“While it was acceptable a few years back to make this a professional services engagement, it no longer is as the bar has been raised in terms of what can and needs to be done with migration tools,” Mueller said. “When done right, these tools are a win/win. For the customer, things go faster and cheaper, while the vendor gets a customer into a paying subscription.”

Box reckons it’s seeing a lot of new customers move to the Box Content Cloud. It claims a 50% increase in managed migration projects since the revamped Box Shuttle launched in February.

Image: Box