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OUR SERVICES

Tenant-to-tenant migration

Fast, smooth and secure tenant migrations that minimise user disruption and maximise business returns.

An Office 365 tenant to tenant migration may be one of the biggest and most complex migrations your organisation will ever undertake. Those in the know understand that it’s also the perfect opportunity to maximise future returns on your technology investment.
Let our skilled Office 365 tenant migration team help you effortlessly navigate the challenges of today’s migration with an eye on optimising your target environment for an even more successful tomorrow.​

Your needs

Our solution​

Mergers, acquisitions and divestitures are sensitive times for any organisation. Getting your data successfully from A to B is only half the challenge. You also need to maintain security, continue to meet your compliance obligations, iron out inconsistencies between tenants, navigate delicate organisational politics, sustain your users’ productivity and ease their transition.

Cloud Essentials specialises in complex tenant to tenant migration for Office 365. We offer fully managed, end-to-end migrations within a fixed budget and timeframe. We understand that you need reliability in a time of great change.

We emphasise project planning with a specific focus on security and governance. Our aim is to go beyond solving your immediate migration challenges to maximise your cloud efficiencies, ensure robust security and enhance your data governance and compliance postures moving forward.

What’s included?​

Tenant to tenant migration advice​

At the due diligence stage to set your project up for lasting success.

Security and governance​

Assessment to unpack your data governance considerations, vulnerabilities, potential cost savings and best practices.

Custom-built Azure-based SaaS migration platform

Combining the best technologies with our proven tenant to tenant migration methodology.

Experienced technical architect

As your project lead, together with a project manager for effortless coordination.

Operational runbooks

Tailored to your project to streamline operations and optimise stakeholder communications.

Talk to our Office 365 tenant to tenant migration experts

Our Office 365 tenant migration credentials

  • 11 years’ experience in complex cloud migrations
  • 7 Gold Microsoft Partnerships
  • Charter Member in Microsoft Content Services Partner Program
  • 50+ Office 365 tenant migrations completed including seven out of ten world banks

Our favourite challenges

We’ve successfully completed some of the largest and most complex Office 365 migrations from tenant to tenant, for clients that include seven out of ten world banks. We routinely handle projects with:

  • Tens of thousands of users
  • Terabytes of data
  • Multiple geographies
  • Hybrid environments
  • Complicated co-dependencies
  • High value and/or sensitive data
  • Requirement for co-existence from day one
  • Inconsistencies in security and governance policies and settings

Frequently Asked Questions

We've compiled common questions we get asked about tenant migration and shared our experts' advice:

Tenant-to-tenant migration is the process of moving users, workloads (e.g. mailboxes, SharePoint, Teams etc.) and/or content from one Microsoft 365 tenant to another. It is frequently required as part of a merger, acquisition or divestiture and can be both complex and nuanced, often benefiting from the experience of a specialist partner.

The 6 biggest challenges affecting tenant-to-tenant migration in Office 365 are:
– Short notice periods and tight timelines
– Sensitivities around data access levels
– The need for multiple tools from multiple vendors
– Consolidating mismatched security and other standards (data classification labels, email archives, SharePoint Taxonomies, etc.)
– Unexpected delays caused by third-party solutions/platforms
– Merging conflicting corporate cultures with mismatched priorities.

To migrate from one Office 365 tenant to another, follow these seven steps:

Scope: Lay out your precise requirements and set your expectations and price point.

Security Baseline Analysis: Establish data governance and security procedures to ensure your target tenant is founded on robust and secure settings.

Design: Create a migration roadmap that leverages the right tools for your requirements.

Test: Pilot test with validation feedback.

Migrate: Action the migration – consider using a SaaS migration platform in Azure.

Optimise: Conduct performance optimisation and issue resolution throughout the migration.

Mature: Analyse opportunities to mature security and compliance post-migration and realise greater value from your new platform.

Proper planning makes a huge difference to the success – and cost – of a tenant-to-tenant migration. Start by analysing what you currently have and what you actually need. You may find opportunities to save costs and add value by offloading redundant third-party solutions, consolidating on-premises workloads in the cloud, and/or optimising your cloud licencing.

Next, you’ll need to define what you want to end up with at the end of the migration. Remember: a need for speed doesn’t always mean defaulting to the “lowest common denominator”. It’s entirely possible to expedite a migration without jeopardising usability, governance or security, and still achieve an optimal environment in the medium to long term.

The amount of time a tenant-to-tenant migration takes depends largely on how many users and how much data you’re working with, and whether there are any throttling limits to be aware of. Important timeline considerations include licence renewal deadlines to meet (or avoid), and whether phasing should be used to reduce user disruption and improve overall user experience.

There is no one-size-fits-all tenant-to-tenant migration tool. Much will depend on the specific functionality you need. In most cases, essential capabilities to look out for in your chosen solution(s) include: pre-migration data mapping; migration automation; intuitive reporting dashboards with effective error flagging; multi-workload handling (including non-Office 354 workloads); and the ability to use a phased (rather than “big bang”) migration approach.

Co-existence during tenant-to-tenant migrations is a way of enabling teams from source and target tenants to communicate and collaborate as one entity before their environments have been fully integrated. It’s a great way to avoid downtime while migrating users and data in strategic batches, and makes it possible for a merger or acquisition to be presented as a fait accompli while the nitty gritty takes place behind the scenes.

A well-planned and well-run tenant-to-tenant migration should require minimal user intervention and result in little to no down time. That said, users often require some support in adjusting to their new environment. In this, a clear communication strategy can be pivotal, helping to manage user expectations, explain upcoming changes and required actions, and drum up excitement for any new features and functionality.

From Our Clients

The Cloud Essentials’ team have shown they are a partner, not just a supplier. The company we acquired advised that the IT integration project was the most successful part of their conversion to join us, which is a reflection on everyone involved. Thank you!

Head of Infrastructure

Job well done! I appreciate your knowledge, expertise, and teamwork/engagement which contributed to a successful migration/cutover.

Client

"Cloud Essentials performed a mail migration for our Institute of Astronomy, from a legacy Microsoft Exchange server to the University Microsoft 365 Tenancy. Cloud Essentials were extremely professional from start to finish. They understood our Higher Education context. They were very flexible when setting the timeline when we had some challenges in our availability to support the work. Their staff were helpful and friendly. They demonstrated great expertise and guided us throughout the process. The migration itself was smooth and fast. Great service by a great team! I would recommend and use their services again."

Higher Education Institution

Project Manager

“This has been very refreshing. And Cloud Essentials have been not just an implementer, but a trusted partner. They’ve effectively become our ‘SharePoint arm’ within the company. They haven’t taken a cookie-cutter approach with something from another environment, but have genuinely wanted to find the best way to help us.”

CIO, Prominent law firm

Colin Short

"Cloud Essentials carried out a very professional service. They stayed cool, calm and collected. I’m sure it won’t be the last time we work with Cloud Essentials."

Global chemical company

Client

It is no small achievement to reduce a corporate enterprise data footprint this significantly in a responsible, well planned and executed manner.

Information Manager, Alexander Forbes

Pierre Blignaut

“Cloud Essentials understand the importance of carrying out a project the right way, no matter the size of it. They don’t take any short cuts.”

Tenant Migration client

“This was a smooth migration with very little impact on the business during the changeover, we would definitely use Cloud Essentials and the Binary Tree toolset again if we need to do another migration!”

CFO, Empact Group

Alan Quinn

Our experience

We’ve been around the migration block a few times – here are a few of our project highlights.