09 Sep Office 365 migration made easy: strategies for a smooth transition
Businesses across Australia are increasingly choosing Office 365 (now known as Microsoft 365) for stronger security, higher productivity, and easier collaboration. But adopting an entirely new platform is easier said than done. The migration process is fraught with challenges that can endanger your data, operations, workflows, and even security.
To ensure a successful transition, the right approach is crucial. You must anticipate potential challenges early, addressing them long before they can present an issue. Your staff will also need to hit the ground running, returning to normal operations after the migration with the smallest disruption possible. All of this starts with a strong strategy.
Why businesses migrate to Office 365
It is not difficult to see why Office 365 is such a popular platform. It provides a wide range of benefits for businesses:
- Improved Collaboration: Tools like Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive make collaboration easier than ever. Staff can work together on the same document, making suggestions and tracking changes in real-time. Virtual meetings ensure that even when a staff member is not in the office, their unique voice can be heard. Employees can communicate effectively, regardless of the circumstances they may find themselves in.
- Increased Productivity: Seamless integration across all 365 platforms reduces the time spent switching between tasks, speeding up workflows and improving output. Staff members can attend a meeting, take notes, create a report, draft a presentation, and send a follow-up email – all within the same productivity suite. Tasks are completed faster and with more cohesion.
- More Scalability: Microsoft’s cloud-based platforms provide an unprecedented level of flexibility and scalability. With tiers designed for businesses at every stage of their journey, 365 empowers long-term growth and supports variable workloads.
- Better Security and Compliance: 365 is well-known for its large variety of highly customisable security measures, which safeguard sensitive data and support regulatory compliance. Along with settings built straight into each app, some Business plans come with additional applications such as Defender and Purview.
- Stronger Business Continuity: Cloud-based access keeps your team online even when things go wrong, storing data safely and allowing work to continue when downtime would otherwise be inevitable. This ensures stronger business continuity.
- Cost Savings: All of the above benefits ultimately save your business money that could have been lost to cyber-attacks, bad investments, or downtime. In the long term, this improves profitability and growth.
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The biggest challenges of Office 365 migration
These compelling benefits do not come without challenges. With so many risks involved, migration can be challenging at the best of times. When you are shifting the very foundation of your business – workflows, email addresses, and critical data – the likelihood of errors is high. Some of the most common challenges faced during migration to Office 365 include:
Licensing and cost management
Office 365 offers a variety of plans aimed at individuals, businesses, and enterprises. This strategy is designed to provide an option that will suit every organisation, no matter where they are in their journey. While it succeeds in this, Microsoft has made licensing quite complicated in the process. It is very easy to accidentally choose the wrong plan, resulting in your business either lacking necessary tools or paying for unnecessary ones.
While the short-term impact of such an error may be minimal (especially if you are able to find a workaround), it will have long-term consequences. Money is wasted, inefficiencies start to appear, and the business slowly becomes less productive than it should be.
Locating equivalents
Chances are, your business already has a complete tech stack. Migrating to Office 365 might address a number of challenges you currently face, but it will also disrupt the systems you have in place. If you use another productivity platform right now, then each tool you access must be replaced with an Office 365 equivalent. While this is relatively easy in some cases (Google Docs to Microsoft Word, for example), it can be a bit tricky for others. Certain crucial extensions, for instance, may not exist on both platforms.
If you are unable to find a direct equivalent, you could be forced to continue paying for the service you originally intended to replace alongside Office 365. This is a disaster, particularly if your goal was to save money by migrating. Alternatively, you could end up using complicated workarounds that don’t truly address the issue. Neither scenario is good.
Integration with existing systems
Most businesses operate in a carefully balanced IT environment that includes third-party tools and legacy systems. While it may work for the time being, migration to a new platform throws all of it out the window. Office 365 must integrate smoothly into your existing technology. If it cannot, then you are wasting time and money.
Data migration issues
Moving large volumes of data is always challenging and frightening. Files, emails, and customer information must all be transferred accurately and in good time. One wrong move could accidentally delete years’ worth of information.
This process becomes even harder for well-established businesses, as a number of quirks will usually appear over time. Files may be stored in odd places or under strange names, permissions might be outdated, or formats may not be easy to transfer between your chosen platforms. These issues can result in data loss, corruption, or even leaks.
Security and compliance concerns
Migration is a time of great upheaval, and often leaves your systems temporarily vulnerable. Threat actors know this, and take great pleasure in exploiting your brief moment of weakness for their own gain. During the transition, you are at greater-than-normal risk of cyber-attacks, breaches, reputational damage, and compliance issues.
Making it through the migration itself is only part of the battle. On the other side, any security that lapsed must be reinstated and reinforced. Failure to do so properly results in enormous vulnerabilities, which could be leveraged to launch an attack years into the future.
Downtime and disruptions
“Downtime” is every business’ least favourite word. Unfortunately, it is also one of the most common risk factors you face during an Office 365 migration. Whether it is a brief disruption as workloads are shifted or the result of a sudden glitch immediately after migration, downtime can occur. Operations halt, customers go unsatisfied, and thousands of dollars could be on the line.
Resistance
Even the best tools will fail if you cannot convince staff to use them. Resistance to a new technology is more common than you might expect, for a number of reasons. They may feel unequipped to handle it, especially if they are older and set in their ways. Perhaps they worry that the new system carries a serious flaw you have not noticed.
Regardless of the reason, the result is the same. Resistance creates friction, slows down operations, and reduces morale. Over time this can create an enormous ripple effect that damages the entire business.
Your Office 365 migration strategy
Fortunately, the process does not need to be this difficult. With the right migration planning, you can mitigate these risk factors and reduce your chance of experiencing an issue. Follow these 365 migration strategies to ensure a smooth transition:
1. Plan ahead
Step one is always ensuring that you are migrating to the right platform. You must verify three things before any action is taken:
- The rest of your IT infrastructure can actually support a migration to Office 365
- You understand which plan your business requires
- You can find a direct equivalent of all necessary software within 365
If you are unable to confirm any of these, stop and consider whether 365 is actually right for your business at this moment in time. If not, but you still wish to migrate, you may need to shift workflows or systems around to make room.
Once this is done, ask what you hope to achieve through the migration. What pain points are you attempting to address? This is crucial for identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) that will help you determine the overall success of your migration.
2. Inventory and audit your environment
Now that you have confirmed you are definitely migrating to Office 365, perform a thorough audit of your entire IT infrastructure. Your goal here is to determine what will be moved, what will stay the same, and what needs to be adjusted or replaced. Consider:
- Data
- Existing software
- Devices
- Networks
- Cloud services
- User accounts (active and inactive)
Now is also an important time to examine your security measures, as you will need to maintain or replace these during the migration. Look at the built-in defences your current platform implements, and note them down for later.
3. Decide on your approach
There are a number of common migration types, each with its own benefits and disadvantages. Some businesses move their entire infrastructure in one go, aiming to finish as fast as possible. Others work in phases, implementing the new platform slowly and systematically. The best tactic for you will depend on your:
- Size
- Current infrastructure
- Industry
- Security and compliance requirements
- Migration goal
4. Plan for downtime, then reduce it
Some amount of disruption is always a possibility, no matter how well thought-out your Office 365 migration strategy is. You must attack this from two angles. First, develop a plan to reduce disruption as much as possible. One common way to achieve this is by using blue/green deployment, where you maintain the old environment while setting up the new one. This way, if any issues are encountered, you need only switch back to the old system while they are resolved.
You must also develop a recovery plan, to handle scenarios where downtime occurs anyway. It is important to be realistic about the fact that sometimes, despite your best efforts, things simply go wrong. How you respond in these situations makes all the difference.
In your plan, explain:
- What should be done to restore operations, and when
- Who is responsible
- When and through which channels communication with third-parties (such as customers) should occur
- Your recovery point objective RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO)
Ensure that everyone understands the plan, and can access it when needed.
5. Backup data
Now is the time to backup all important data. Do not attempt to migrate without a backup, as you could lose critical information with no way of retrieving it. For best results, use the 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies of your data, across 2 different media, with at least 1 offsite or in the cloud. This will significantly reduce your risk of data loss.
6. Consider security and compliance
Security is non-negotiable at all times, even during a migration. It’s important both for preventing cyber-attacks and for maintaining regulatory compliance. Fortunately, this process presents you with an opportunity to address any areas that may have been lacking. You may actually end up with stronger security than you had before.
Here are some measures to implement during or immediately after migration:
- Data encryption while at rest and in transit.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP) rules. These can be set using Microsoft Purview, if applicable.
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA).
- Access controls, such as the principle of least privilege.
- Endpoint security.
Any inactive user accounts should be deleted, and outdated permissions should be updated. Once the migration is complete, ensure that Office 365 has been configured securely. Performing these steps now could save you a lot of trouble later. Remember to provide additional cyber awareness training, so staff remember to uphold your defences.
7. Commit to post-migration support
Migration is not necessarily over once your new systems are online. There will be an adjustment period. Allow room for minor issues to surface and users to learn the new platform. Your post-migration support plan should include:
- Training to help staff understand 365’s products and how they fit into the workflow
- Support for any user issues that occur, such as lock-outs
- Careful monitoring for potential issues
- Testing to ensure that everything works correctly and data was properly transferred
- A formal review (typically a month or so later) to check that KPIs were met and everything functions as expected.
8. Document everything
While it may seem unimportant, documentation of every action is critical. It allows you to retrace your steps if something goes wrong, identifying the issue faster. You will also be able to demonstrate compliance efforts if your business is audited, by providing evidence of your security strategies. Keep multiple copies of these documents in secure locations, and update them regularly.
Additional tips for a seamless Office 365 migration
The steps listed above will provide you with a basic 365 migration strategy. These additional tips will help you ensure success:
Don’t be scared to outsource
Sometimes, migration is too complex to handle on your own. In these situations, don’t be afraid to partner with a managed service provider (MSP). They can handle the process for you, eliminating errors and supporting you throughout the process.
Migrate emails from Google Workspace to Office 365
Email migration sounds a lot more complicated than it actually is, particularly when swapping between these two platforms. You can migrate emails from Google Workspace to Office 365 using a process called “Automated batch migration”, which vastly simplifies the process, or through a manual process if more control is required. Microsoft advises users to partner with an expert and keep the Google environment active during this process.
Leverage Microsoft’s migration resources
You are not alone during the migration process. Microsoft provides plenty of resources to help you, such as the data migration tool. You can also find a wealth of information on their website. Make use of this where possible.
FAQs
How long does migration take?
This depends on the strategy you use and how many issues are encountered along the way. A staged migration, for example, will take longer than a simple lift-and-shift.
Is there a difference between Office 365 and Microsoft 365?
No. Microsoft 365 is just the new name for the same product. However, many users still know it as “Office 365”, and sometimes Microsoft themselves will use this name to prevent confusion.
Will we lose any emails or data?
You should not lose any information if the migration is performed properly. Proper backup practices will help prevent loss in the event of an accident.
How can we support staff during the transition?
You can support staff by providing additional training on how to use Office 365, and offering a judgement-free zone where they can ask questions or have issues resolved. This will help secure buy-in.
Does copilot come with Office 365?
No. Currently, Copilot is a separate add-on for all Microsoft 365 plans, and costs an additional subscription fee.
The support you need for a seamless migration
Your migration to Office 365 doesn’t need to be chaotic. With a good strategy and the right support, it can be a relatively smooth process. This platform presents you with an incredible opportunity to improve your business’ efficiency, security, and productivity. All you need to do is reach out and take it.
If you don’t feel equipped to handle migration alone, that’s alright. TCT’s support specialists are here to help. Our fast issue resolution and clear communication keep your business on track for long-term success. Learn more about our Sydney or Melbourne support services now.