Enterprise Playbook to Migrate to Microsoft 365

In an effort to consolidate cloud operations and maximize operational efficiency and cost-savings, if your enterprise organization is planning a migration to Microsoft 365, it is crucial to create proper strategies. They go a long way in helping your IT team lay out a structured roadmap for the migration of cloud storage drives, chat messaging apps, email systems, and more, to the relevant Microsoft 365 apps.

Explore this post to gather actionable insights and prepare a solid framework to migrate your enterprise’s source clouds to the Microsoft 365 suite.

Migration Planning and Preparation

It all starts with proper preparation and planning. Large-sized enterprises must plan and prepare as per the migration use case. For example, if your organization is planning to consolidate the entire cloud operations into the Microsoft 365 suite, it is crucial to understand which drives and apps to migrate and learn about their license renewal dates accordingly.

Equally important is to plan and prepare in the target cloud side. Make sure that your organization finalizes the right Microsoft 365 license to meet the consolidation requirements. Other essential steps, such as readying admin login credentials for cloud authentication go a long way in ensuring proper preparedness before proceeding to the advance stages of the migration project.

Tool Discovery and Demo

The next critical stage to prioritize is to explore cloud office migration tools, Microsoft 365 migration tool in specific, and choose the one that can meet all your organization’s enterprise-scale migration needs. It is during the migration partner discovery phase that your IT team must also demo the tool or schedule an in-depth POC session to test its capabilities as per your organization’s highly specific use cases.

Create a pilot user batch to demo the tool. Plan the demo or POC session in such a way that your IT team gets to have full clarity on the tool’s capabilities without spending a lot of time. A pilot batch of five users is a sweet spot for medium to large-sized enterprises to wrap up the demo session within a day and validate/assess the results.

Pre-Migration Analysis and SOW Planning

After finalizing the migration service provider, such as CloudFuze, coordinate with their migration team to perform an extensive pre-migration analysis. Leverage the migration vendor’s expertise and technical know-how of cloud drives and apps and deeply understand the structure of your enterprise organization’s source clouds’ structures.
The deeper level of clarity your IT team gains, the better you can plan the scope of work for the entire project that includes the migration of:

User accounts
User content (files and folders)
Mailboxes and attachments
Chat messages and attachments
Calendar events and metadata
Office 365 tenants

User Batch Segregation and Migration

The key to performing smooth and secure migrations despite the high-volume enterprise-level scope of work is user batch segregation. With this approach, your organization can perform the migration in a phased way and lower the risks of:

API rate limit throttling
Migration items going into conflict?
Validation oversight

One-Time and Delta Migration Validation

Validation is just as important as the planning part. Without proper validation, your IT team will not have a clear picture of the accuracy of the planned migration. Access the migration reports that the tool generates and validate them extensively by coordinating with the vendor’s migration team.

You can check out our migration report guide to learn about the key parameters your IT team must check to streamline the validation process.

Avoid Going Wrong in Your Enterprise’s Microsoft 365 Migration

Leverage our migration team’s 10+ years of experience in strategically planning your organization’s migration to Microsoft 365. Connect with us today for a free and no-obligation consultation on how you can strategize your enterprise’s entire migration project.