Which Office 365 Migration Works Best for Your Business?

By this point, the benefits of migrating to Office 365 are well known: anywhere access to email, seamless collaboration, lower operating costs, etc. So, now you’ve decided you want to take the plunge and get on Office 365. Great! Now you just have to figure out how you’re going to get all your email onto the service.

Just as there is a wide number of Office 365 plans to choose from, there are nearly as many ways to migrate to them. And as a result, it can be hard to figure out what will work best for your business. In this post, we’ll go over the three main types of migration and when each is likely to be used.

Cutover Migration

By far the most common method, the cutover migration to Office 365 is also the most straightforward. This process involves replicating the email, contacts & calendar data of your current email hosting to Office 365 in the background of your day-to-day operations, in one shot.

There are a number of benefits to migrating in this way. For one thing, it is the least complex method of transferring your email data, and takes the least amount of time. As a result, this method also tends to be the most cost effective. Overall, cutover migrations are a very good option for smaller businesses with limited budgets.

Staged Migrations

A staged migration operates similarly to the cutover migration in that content is replicated in the background. The biggest difference is that not everything will move at once. This process typically ranges within a few hours to a few days, but is still not a true long term migration solution.

The Office 365 staged migration is very much the middle option for businesses. Staged migrations work best when your organization not too small and not too large, and isn’t using the most up to date server software, but not the oldest available either. Right in the middle! If your organization falls outside this range, you best option is cutover or the next migration type on our list…

Hybrid Migration

Last but not least is the hybrid Office 365 migration process, which involves linking your current host with Office 365 to function as a synchronized unit. This allows users to be slowly deployed within Office 365 over time without disrupting the operations of your organization.

Office 365 hybrid migrations are ideal for larger businesses that cannot afford to replicate all users into the cloud at once due to its inefficiency. By spreading the process out over several weeks or months, these organizations can conserve their bandwidth usage and ensure everything is working correctly. Another added benefit of the hybrid migration is that it allows businesses to run pilot tests of Office 365 for small groups of users without fully committing to the service.

A Quick Note About Migrations

While each of the above migration methods will have their own appeal, they are not always a one size fits all endeavor. For example, each of the above methods is only compatible with a set number of server types and hosting arrangements. Therefore, just because a staged migration worked for one business, doesn’t mean that it will work for another.

With the help of a technology partner like Metro CSG, however, you can migrate to Office 365 without having to worry about the above issues. By running an assessment of your network, we can determine the best migration method to use and help get you into the cloud platform! And with the help of the migration tools at our disposal, can cut down the amount of time spend planning and preparing, so you can reap the benefits of the cloud faster.


Office 365 Migration Preparedness Checklist
 

Interested in more articles like this?

Sign up for our blog and get all our latest posts sent directly to your inbox!

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Share this:

Leave A Comment