Onboarding to Office 365

How the Cloudficient Managed Migration Service Works

At Cloudficient we have many years of experience performing migrations of legacy archives as well as onboarding users ...


At Cloudficient we have many years of experience performing migrations of legacy archives as well as onboarding users to Office 365. Typically, we see customers that might want to try these types of projects themselves but often realize that it’s not as easy as it first seems.

Key Takeaways 

  • Compliance migrations are different from regular data migrations as they involve large and important archives, such as Exchange journal archives, that are tamper-proof and crucial for eDiscovery searches or legal procedures.
  • Compliance migrations involve challenges such as data quality issues, the need for specialized software and expertise, and the importance of maintaining the integrity and accessibility of the data during and after the migration.
  • Cloudficient's Managed Service offers a six-stage process for compliance migrations and onboarding users to Office 365: workshops, design, pilot, optimize, ramp-up, and execution.
  • The Managed Service includes a customized and optimized approach, tailored migration process, pilot testing, optimization, and automation of the entire process using workflow templates.

Our Managed Service ensures that you get the right amount of expertise to complete your project.  It allows your IT system administrators, or technical teams, to get on with the job of taking advantage of the new products and services that Office 365 offers and may make your organization more productive and efficient.   

Our Managed Service goes through these 6 stages:

Stage 1 – Workshops

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Workshops help to get the project started and for you, as the customer, to tell us more about the requirements. With many departments and internal stakeholders often having varying requirements, it’s typically not as straight forward as simply needing to migrate data or onboard users to Office 365. In order for the project to be successful, a customized and optimized approach will be needed.

Stage 2 - Design

We work hand in hand with your team to ensure that we create a tailored migration process that suits both the project and business requirements.  Our delivery team will work to build that custom process within Cloudficient technology so it may be fully automated.

Stage 3 - Pilot

Hand holding light bulb on dark background, new idea concept

As with any sizeable project whether it’s IT related or not, we start the actual migration with a pilot group of users. Customers have different ways of picking the users who are in the pilot group: sometimes it’s a particular team or department, sometimes it’s all or part of the IT organization, and sometimes it’s a cross-organizational group of users who have a good understanding of what is going to take place.

Stage 4 - Optimize

During the pilot phase any network, infrastructure or performance issues that appear, or questions that arise from users who are migrated or onboarded are gathered and the design, if needed, is changed to optimize the migration.

With our constant eye on the Office 365 space along with our knowledge from current and previous projects we are already keenly aware of things like Microsoft Service Protection Throttling, but there might be other temporary or permanent changes which are needed in order to ensure a smooth migration.

Stage 5 - Ramp-up

In this stage we start to add additional migration load. More and more users will be added to the migration onboarding queues and we’ll be actively monitoring this to find the best amount of load for the best performance.

Stage 6 - Execution

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This stage is where the orchestration and end-to-end workflow templates in EVComplete or Onboarding 365 Complete really stand out. Most, or all, of the entire process, not just the data migration, is automated using the workflow templates that were designed earlier, piloted successfully and optimized if required.

Of course during this time we’re monitoring the migration to ensure that surprises like Service Protection Throttling, infrastructure related issues or load issues on the source environment are well understood and any further optimization is performed.

With these 6 stages in the project lifecycle, Cloudficient ensures a consistent, well tested methodology is used. With tailored steps in the migration to suit your business requirements and a huge amount of passion to get the job done, your migration will be in great hands!

With unmatched next generation migration technology, Cloudficient is revolutionizing the way businesses retire legacy systems and transform their organization into the cloud. Our business constantly remains focused on servicing client needs and creating product offerings that match them.

If you would like to learn more about how to bring Cloudficiency to your migration project, visit our website, or contact us.

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