Box launches Shuttle to help big companies move more data to the cloud

Cloud file syncing and sharing service Box today is announcing the launch of Box Shuttle, a new service that combines software and consulting to help businesses more efficiently move their data into Box. It’s available now in beta and will become generally available in the fall.

Under Box Shuttle, Box will help companies make migration plans, determine what should be moved, and apply retention policies — very useful for large companies that want to rely less on their own infrastructure for file storage. Box already has many Fortune 500 customers, including Coca Cola, Eli Lilly, GE, and Pfizer. But there’s still room to grow.

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“Now we’re at a stage where the next sort of final barrier is how can customers get all the other data that they have in their on-premises systems and be able to move that to the cloud?” Box CEO Aaron Levie told VentureBeat in an interview.

The combination of software and hand-holding, through consulting for Shuttle, is Box’s way of drawing on the different migration strategies it has used in the past. Initially, Box referred companies to partners when they needed help, and then Box offered the software needed to make the move, Levie said.

Other cloud storage vendors have their own ways of helping companies migrate data to the cloud en masse. Google has many Google for Work partners that can support adoption of Google Drive, and Microsoft has consultants to help with adoption of OneDrive.

Amazon Web Services, the most popular public cloud for hosting applications, last year introduced the Snowball, a piece of hardware that companies could load data onto and then ship to AWS so the data could be easily uploaded onto AWS infrastructure. Shuttle won’t be doing that. “They certainly one-upped us in that area,” Levie said. But perhaps one day, he said, it will be possible for customers to use Snowball and then port data from the AWS S3 storage service into Box.

Box Shuttle will cost customers $2,000 “for most basic data migrations, and it goes up from there,” Levie said.

Box has had a consulting arm since 2013 and has supported more than 3,500 deployments of the core cloud service, Box vice president of consulting Tim Smith wrote in a blog post.