IT Guide to Move AI-Ready Data from Box to Microsoft 365

Is your organization planning to move from Box to Microsoft 365? As an IT leader or a decision maker, it is first important to understand the new shift that’s happening in this space.

Now migrating from a standalone cloud like Box to a collaboration suite like Microsoft 365 is no longer limited to one-and-done migrations. With almost all companies racing to adopt AI securely, the cloud migration trend has now shifted to focusing on AI readiness during migration.

Learn about it all in this detailed IT guide.

The Migration Approach Has Now Shifted to AI Readiness

AI tools and agents bring a lot of productivity and efficiency gains. Copilot, specifically, deeply understand information across SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Outlook, and more.

Although Copilot aligns with Microsoft 365 permissions, it can surface sensitive and confidential documents and resources when mismanaged and ungoverned permission lives in your Microsoft 365 environment. As a result, organizations either delay Copilot AI deployment or deploy them messy.

According to a Process Excellence Network report, data quality and availability are the biggest AI adoption challenges for over 52% of business leaders.

How to Move AI-Ready Data from Box to Microsoft 365

Migration is the single best opportunity to reset your governance posture and improve AI readiness in your company’s Microsoft 365 ecosystem. By treating the migration as a data transformation event, you can ensure clean and AI-ready data arrives in Microsoft 365, which further enables secure AI deployment and adoption, organization-wide.

The value in cloud migrations is no longer in “moving” the data. It’s going to be making that data usable, trustworthy, and AI-ready during the process. -Anthony Raymond, Head of Sales and Strategic Partnerships, CloudFuze.

To put this into practice, it essentially boils down to three key phases:

1. Cleanup Data in Box Cloud

Instead of approaching the migration in a traditional way, you can use it as an opportunity to cleanup content sprawl, disjointed permissions, risky external sharing, etc., in your organization’s Box environment and migrate them as AI-ready data to Microsoft 365.

To do this, you can use CloudFuze Manage to understand the data health in your Box Cloud and set up policies to take necessary remediation steps, such as:

• Identifying duplicate files and deduplicating them
• Reviewing public links and revoking them if necessary
• Removing risky external shares done without security approvals
• Identifying and reworking stale permissions and removing stale content

As you can see in the screenshot below, CloudFuze Manage’s Data Deep Dive dashboard provides a full picture of the overall data health in Box cloud, through which you can remediate content and permission mess and make them AI-ready.

2. Migrate AI-Ready Data to Microsoft 365

After cleaning up content sprawl and permission mess in the Box cloud, migrate the data, along with rich collaboration context, to Microsoft 365. CloudFuze Migrate preserves various types of metadata and context, including:

• Sharing permissions
• External shares
• Hyperlinks
• Timestamps
• Versions
• Shared links
• Box Notes
• In-line comments
• Folder structures

With a combination of AI-ready data and preservation of rich collaboration context, you will be all set for highly secure and compliant Copilot deployment and adoption in Microsoft 365.

3. Continuously Govern Migrated Data in Microsoft 365

Unlike traditional migration, where IT teams close the project after moving all data to Microsoft 365, the new approach focuses on continuous governance after migration completion.

It is important to understand that AI-focused governance is not a one-time audit. It’s a continuous living process that should be an integral part of your everyday IT operations.

This means that the entire governance framework should be embedded into the entire life cycle of users. This helps ensure that every user role change, every new user onboarding, and every user exit is accounted for.

Want to See It in Practice?

Interested in learning how this new approach works in real migration scenarios? We would be happy to help you understand everything with a professional demo, free of cost, without any obligation.

Contact us today!

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is AI-ready data and why is it important for Microsoft 365?

AI-ready data essentially means data that is well cleaned and governed enough to be secure for AI deployment and usage in Microsoft 365. AI outputs depend on the data layer living in a cloud ecosystem like Microsoft 365. If the data is well-governed, AI outputs will be safe. If not, AI can inadvertently surface sensitive and confidential data.

2. How can I prepare my data in Box for a successful transfer to Microsoft 365?

The best way to prepare your data inbox for a successful AI-ready transfer to Microsoft 365 is to clean it up and govern it using SaaS and AI governance tools like CloudFuze Manage. If you do that, the data you migrate to Microsoft 365 will be optimal for AI deployment and usage.

3. How do I migrate AI-ready data stored in a cloud file sharing service to a cloud productivity platform?

You can use a professional cloud migration tool like CloudFuze Migrate to transfer AI-ready data and ensure the permissions that you have cleaned up prior to migration do not get restructured, which otherwise can raise security risks during AI retrievals.