Best Practices For A Smooth And Secure Office 365 Cloud Migration

Office 365 (Microsoft 365) is a cloud-based email solution that is known for enhancing collaboration and security. Due to this and various other benefits, businesses migrate from their existing on-premises infrastructure to this cloud-based solution.

However, migration to Office 365 is not that simple. It involves proper planning and execution, and undertaking some post-migration tasks for successful completion of the project. In this article, we will be talking about some common best practices which will help you in successfully migrating to Office 365.

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Best Practices For Safe And Smooth Transition To Office 365

Below, we will be mentioning some best practices that can help you in the entire Office 365 migration process – from planning to post-migration.

1. Define Goals And Objectives

A business or a company decides to move to Office 365 due to various reasons, such as to reduce IT overhead, increase security, support remote work and collaboration, etc. Whatever be the reason, you must establish measurable objectives and goals. You should also decide the migration path your company would like to take. The migration path depends on the size and number of mailboxes, and the global size of the company.

2. Choose The Migration Method

For migrating data from local Exchange Server to Office 365, there are three methods of migration to choose from. Each method comes with its pros and cons. You can choose the migration method depending on the size of your company and business requirements.

Cutover migration is ideal for businesses with a small number of mailboxes. In this, the domain starts to point to the Office 365 tenant and the data is transferred at once. This should preferably be performed during a weekend.
Staged migration comes in handy for mid-sized businesses. The migration is done in phases, with batches of mailboxes being run over time.
Hybrid migration is the smoothest migration option. In this, the local Exchange Server and Office 365 work as one server. You can gradually move the mailboxes from local to online. However, it is also the slowest and the most complex one.

3. Evaluate The Current Setup

Before starting the migration, the company would need to do a bit of spring cleaning and check the inventory of the current infrastructure. These include:

Inventory of all the mailboxes, groups, and archives with their sizes, aliases, and domains. This will determine the migration effort and licenses to purchase.
Depending on the migration approach, you should evaluate the current hardware and network to ensure that the server resources and network bandwidth are enough for performing the migration.

4. Cleanup And Backup Of Data

From the inventory, you can identify the mailboxes or resources which will be migrated, set as shared mailboxes, or discarded. From the list of inventory, you can determine the data the company has and decide to not migrate the data which is old.

After a full backup of the server, you can proceed to purge and remove any unwanted data, accounts, or groups. Other tasks would involve checking if the permissions and delegations are set correctly and if there are any duplicate accounts.

5. Security Considerations

When moving to Office 365, you must consider the security practices to protect the tenant. Microsoft offers shared responsibilities, where the infrastructure is protected by the company, but for the data and access, the client is responsible. You can also look into the following:

Enforcing Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) on all user and admin accounts.
Reviewing compliance settings to meet regulations.
Considering to introduce Conditional Access Policies to further lock down the access to accounts, like IP, country, devices, connection strength, etc.

6. Set Up The Tenant

After purchasing the licenses and assigning them to the newly created users, follow these steps:

Verify the domains and check if they’re correctly configured in Office 365 with the DNS verification.
Check if the mail flow is configured to the company’s requirements with multi-function relay and other devices.
Verify if the security policies and retention policies are correctly applied.

7. Migration Of Data

Migrating the data using the built-in tools needs some preparation work. With the hybrid model, there are a number of tasks to be done. Moreover, there are numerous points of failures, especially if the Exchange Server is not supported, not updated, or not working efficiently.

For easy and smooth migration of data, you can take the help of a third-party Exchange migration tool, such as Stellar Migrator for Exchange. With this specialized tool, you can migrate the mailboxes and public folders from local Exchange to Office 365, from Office 365 to Office 365, and even from Office 365 back to Exchange Server. The tool offers a simplified user interface that automates the complex task of migration and reduces the need for manual intervention and technical expertise. During migration, it offers real-time tracking and delta migration.

8. Post Migration Checks

When all the data has been synced and the domain changeover of the MX record is done, you should do some post migration tests to ensure that the migration was successful. Some of these tests include testing of email traffic by users (via mobile device, Outlook, web access), testing of multi-function devices, permissions, and access. Other post migration tasks include review of security for continuous protection and other things, such as:

Setting up of email encryption policies to safeguard sensitive information.
Email security and protection.
Access management controls.
Decommission of Exchange Server and destruction of hard drives for regulatory and compliance purposes.

9. User Training And Support

A part of the transition to Office 365 is to offer training and support to the users, who will be using the system. This can be achieved with the following:

Keeping the users up-to-date about the migration process – from start to finish.
Creating troubleshooting guides and common issues.
Assigning and training specific people as champions.
Hosting workshops on collaboration and usage.

Conclusion

As you have seen above, migration to Office 365 requires a lot of planning and preparation before diving straight into the migration of data. We have also seen how important it is to have the right tools, like Stellar Migrator for Exchange, for the migration of data. We have also discussed the post-migration tasks that you need to do to ensure the project’s successful completion.

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