Don’t Just Survive Your Office 365 Tenant Migration — Master It!

Office 365 is often an organization’s first major step into the public cloud. That move is often accompanied by various fears, but Microsoft has always made it a point to keep each customer’s data separate — and that strategy has proven to be a very effective way of enhancing security. However, now it seems like virtually every organization is using Office 365. As they start facing mergers, acquisitions or divestures, the strict separation of AD tenants is posing some challenges: How can you successfully migrate users and data from one tenant to another?

There’s another hitch as well. Most organizations that adopt the Microsoft cloud maintain at least part of their on-premises IT infrastructure, including Active Directory (AD). In fact, Microsoft says that 75 percent of customers with at least 500 users have a hybrid AD environment — their on-premises AD remains the primary source of authentication and authorization, and they sync that on-premises AD to Azure AD using Azure AD Connect. Naturally, having one or two hybrid environments further complicates the migration or consolidation project during a merger or acquisition.

In our companion white paper to this e-book, Common Pitfalls of Office 365 Tenant-to-Tenant Migration, we laid out the major stumbling blocks organizations encounter as they plan and execute a tenant-to-tenant migration. Here, we’ll explain the best practices that will help you migrate your AD users, Exchange mailboxes and OneDrive data quickly, safely, completely and with minimal impact on the business, including how to:

• Determine the true scope of your project
• Back up your existing environment
• Decide what to migrate and what to leave behind
• Ensure coexistence along the way
• And much more