Fast, smooth and secure tenant migrations that minimise user disruption and maximise business returns.
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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.
At the due diligence stage to set your project up for lasting success.
Assessment to unpack your data governance considerations, vulnerabilities, potential cost savings and best practices.
Combining the best technologies with our proven tenant to tenant migration methodology.
As your project lead, together with a project manager for effortless coordination.
Tailored to your project to streamline operations and optimise stakeholder communications.
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:
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.
We’ve been around the migration block a few times – here are a few of our project highlights.
Read our insider tips on navigating complex tenant migrations
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