10 Key Post-migration Support Focus Areas for IT Admins

Introduction

How you wrap up your company’s cloud data migration largely determines the overall success of the migration project. For enterprises, SMBs, and MSPs, the best way to close the migration project is to make the most of the migration partner’s post-migration support.

This guide focuses on helping IT admins prioritize the crucial aspects of post-migration support to ensure that the migration project closes perfectly, without any loopholes.

1. Checking if All the Migrated Features Are Intact

The first and the most crucial check to perform after the one-time migration is to learn if all the migrated features, such as sharing permissions, timestamps, and version history, are intact with the respective files and folders.

Leverage the migration partner’s post-migration support service to:

• Check if external collaboration is intact
• Check if the root folder and file permissions are intact
• Check if the inner folder and file permissions are intact
• Check if the proper timestamp (created or modified) is intact

CloudFuze offers market-leading 24/7 data migration support (including post-migration support) to enterprises, SMBs, and MSPs.

2. Checking if Source Cloud-specific Features Are Migrated Perfectly

In some cases, source cloud-specific features are tricky to migrate to the destination cloud. For example, when migrating Box Notes to OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online, check with the migration partner that they are converted to Microsoft Word doc or .DOCX.

Get help from the migration partner’s post-migration support service to check and ensure that the selected source-cloud features are migrated or converted with 100% accuracy.

3. Checking if Unsupported Special Characters Are Resolved

Navigating through unsupported special characters, file/folder names, and file path length are the major challenges when migrating standalone cloud storage services such as Box and Dropbox to Microsoft 365.

As part of using the migration partner’s post-migration assistance, check and ensure:

• Unsupported special characters in Microsoft 365 are converted to supported ones
• Unsupported file and folder names in Microsoft 365 are converted to supported ones
• The file path length is trimmed to 400 characters or less

CloudFuze’s cloud data migration platform has a built-in function to automatically replace unsupported special characters with (_) or (-) and resolve unsupported long file paths.

4. Resolving End Users’ Challenges with the Post Migration Support Team

In many cases, end-users (employees) face the challenge of making sense of the migrated data. For example, changes in folder or file structure as planned before the migration kick-off may confuse end-users, especially if they are not informed prior.

Since the migration team of the migration partner will have good clarity over the migrated data, you can take the team’s assistance to help the end-users rationalize the migrated data. Also, we recommend looking at the migration reports.

5. Rationalizing Data Size Increase in the Destination Cloud

It is not always that the migrated data size will be the same as the source cloud. When migrating file versions, the size of the migrated data will increase in the destination cloud.

The migrated data size will significantly increase if your company plans to transfer all file versions.

Take help from the migration team to audit the data size increase during the post migration support stage. The number of file versions migrated will help justify the increase migrated data size.

6. Analyzing Custom Feature Migration

If one or more custom requirements are a part of your company’s migration scope, it is crucial to analyze how well the migration partner has met the requirement(s).

For example, if your company has the custom requirement to migrate specific embedded links, take help from the migration team and ensure that there are no loopholes.

7. Checking if All the Incremental Changes Are Migrated During Delta Migration

Rationalizing migrated data becomes highly challenging if all the incremental changes are not migrated during delta migration. Therefore, it is essential to check with the migration team and ensure that no incremental changes are missed out.

Work with the post-migration support team to compare one-time migration and delta migration reports to ensure all the incremental changes are migrated.

8. Re-auditing the Entire Scope of Work

After completing the entire one-time and delta migration, it is critical to re-audit the entire scope of work (SOW) to ensure that the migration project is a complete success.

Work with the post-migration support team to analyze if the migration end results are true to the SOW of the migration project.

9. Cleaning Up or Archiving Source Cloud Data

Your company may plan to leave the source cloud altogether and cancel annual source cloud plans. In that case, it is crucial to use the post-migration support opportunity to perform source cloud data clean-up before the annual plan renewal deadline.

But if your company plans not to leave the source cloud entirely and rather cut down costs, archiving necessary data is a needle mover task to prioritize. Work with the post migration support team to navigate through the technical challenges.

10. Planning the Next Migration Project

If you are an MSP, the chances are high that you may have other cloud data migration projects of your clients coming up. As you wrap up the migration project, you can borrow or replicate some of the approaches and structures in another upcoming project to plan better.

Understand with the post-migration support team how the approaches taken in the freshly completed migration projects fit into the context of another upcoming project.

• Learn about the scope of replicating T&Cs amendments in the upcoming project
• Learn about the scope of replicating the approach to justify overage charges
• Check if there is a scope for replicating the approach to analyzing migration reports
• Learn about the scope of replicating data validation approaches