Tenant-to-tenant migration

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.

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.