• Each migration presented unique constraints: varying tenant architectures, data volumes, security policies, and stakeholder requirements
• Coordinating across multiple clients with potentially different timelines, regulatory regimes, and geographic spread
• Maintaining user productivity during transitions
• Managing large data volumes, multiple workloads, domain consolidations, and co-existence
• Applied a disciplined, repeatable migration methodology combining technical expertise, vendor-agnostic toolsets, and rigorous project governance
• Tailored each migration’s design to client-specific constraints
• Emphasised stakeholder communication, change management, and phased rollouts to avoid disruption
• Leveraged cumulative learning from earlier migrations to improve efficiency and risk mitigation in subsequent projects
• Cloud Essentials was tasked with answering three critical questions for the client:
• What was the client’s current data risk exposure under their existing setup?
• Which underutilised Microsoft features could return greater value?
• Where and how should the client begin to remediate risks and capitalise on opportunities?
• Discovery – Understanding business requirements and challenges
• Assessment – Benchmark current compliance maturity against relevant regulations
• Exploration – In-depth knowledge of Microsoft Purview resulted in “quick wins” using underutilised features
• Next Steps – Roadmap of changes to strengthen governance, optimise ROI, and form a business case for investment
• Tight timeline with only one month to migrat
• Multiple workloads moving simultaneously
• Disparate remote users across different time zones, plus existing security and access complications
• Need for pre-migration work under same deadline
• Use of a robust, proven migration runbook to bring confidence in delivery.
• Parallel migration of workloads with a coordinated cutover date
• Focused project and change management to deal with time zone coordination and stakeholder communication
• Pre-migration fixes to ensure a clean cutover.
• Shared tenant environment with multiple trading companies, creating complexity in governance.
• Operating in a highly regulated industry with strict requirements for data protection.
• Sensitive IP and data needing proper control and lifecycle management of Teams and SharePoint sites.
• Introduced AvePoint for Cloud Governance to automate rules and workflows around creation, oversight, and lifecycle management of Teams and SharePoint sites.
• Proof of concept to show value, followed by live deployment with configuration and customisation aligned to Aspen’s business processes and regulatory demands.
• Applied governance to existing Teams and SharePoint sites, plus OneDrive and Active Directory workloads under the same policy framework.
• Ensured ongoing support and training, and leveraged relationship with AvePoint for fast issue resolution.
• Organic growth across regions – inconsistent data management & regulatory coverage.
• Need to demonstrate compliance with data protection laws to stakeholders and maintain reputation as a data processor.
• Large volumes of unstructured and regionally-varied data; absent or weak classification taxonomy.
• Performed a Data Privacy Assessment and Advisory Workshop to establish current compliance posture.
• Conducted interactive, cross-functional workshops with legal, compliance, risk & IT to simplify regulations and the technology options.
• Designed a fit-for-purpose, adaptable data classification taxonomy for global operation.
• Delivered a structured roadmap, complete with a Power BI dashboard visualising compliance maturity & recommendations for immediate and longer-term improvements across people, process & tech.
• Managing a very large global footprint: 71 offices across 50+ countries, with 9,800+ employees.
• More than 26 000 Microsoft 365 objects to oversee and manage.
• Need for administrative control to be segmented: local/regional units should have permissions over their users without exposing everything globally.
• Required sub-tenanting to give delegated control while retaining oversight.
• Designed a specialist tenant management architecture using Coreview, including virtual tenants and hybrid server components.
• Configured licence pools, permissions, workflows, and reporting within Coreview to reflect business units and regional boundaries.
• Expert installation, configuration and training.
• Maintained transparent communication: daily technical check-ins, weekly stakeholder meetings to ensure alignment.
• Multiple domains to consolidate, with legacy systems and non-optimal OS versions in use.
• Extremely distributed workforce with minimal user input, so disruption risk very high.
• Need for co-existence from day one to avoid downtime or breakdown.
• Historic business units whose email traffic and identity needed to be preserved.
• Selected vendor-agnostic tools for migrating Outlook email, OneDrive, and infrastructure to the new Microsoft 365 tenant.
• Created a new Active Directory service, migrated user profiles, servers, and other IT assets so users would log in without feeling like “new” users.
• Phased migration over several months with co-existence setup.
• Managed older operating system challenges with partial migration and manual cutovers where needed.
• Need to consolidate multiple group companies under one tenant while dealing with fixed, tight timescales.
• Over 1,000 users to be migrated, including Mail, OneDrive, Teams, and SharePoint.
• Required coexistence so that migrated and non-migrated users could still collaborate during transition.
• Phased approach required to minimise disruption.
• Use of a multi-staged migration plan to meet migration of all workloads (Mail, OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint).
• Detailed handover phase, enabling the client’s internal IT team to take over maintenance & support.
• Coexistence maintained: both old and new environments operational during migration.
• Transparent communications: daily technical team meetings, weekly stakeholder updates to ensure alignment & tracking progress.
• A legal firm with 600 staff handling 1 million emails/month.
• Existing document/matter management system was aging and hard to maintain.
• Requirement for secure remote working and minimal friction accessing documents and matters from outside the office.
• Need for affordability, usability, deep Outlook integration.
• Implemented Custodian for Legal by Repstor, an Office 365 matter management platform that integrates directly with Outlook.
• Full transparency and searchability.
• Removed need for VPNs by securing remote access through Microsoft 365 tools.
• Standardised processes across practice areas to reduce variation, improve efficiency.
• Migrating data for 2,700K+ mailbox users, 3,200 OneDrive users; plus 149 SharePoint & Teams sites.
• Huge data volume: 7+ TB of mailboxes, 21 TB in OneDrive, 21 million files.
• Partial or limited access to the source tenant; permissions changing / limited scope of access.
• Political sensitivities (competitor acquisition) and evolving project requirements and user lists.
• Selected a robust toolset (AvePoint Fly) suitable for large scale migrations under limited permissions.
• Maintained flexibility: dealt with monthly changing HR lists, variable user numbers, scope changes while keeping project on track.
• Strong project management and reporting: frequent status updates, clarity on what’s in scope, trusted process to ensure sensitive competitor-data was handled with discretion.
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