During a restructuring, organizations may need to migrate within the Microsoft 365 cloud platform from one tenant to another. The data migration process requires preparation and careful planning to avoid losing important data and incoming email. Microsoft recommends, especially if the company has more than 500 employees, that you contact a Microsoft partner for migration. 365Solutions has successfully migrated over 10,000 mailboxes and has experience in various migration scenarios.

What is migration between tenants?

A Microsoft 365 tenant is a separate and unique tenant account that provides an environment for managing Microsoft 365 users, services, and data. Tenants are hosted on Microsoft cloud servers that are backed up around the world.

Cross-tenant migration involves moving mailboxes and service settings from one Microsoft 365 account to another.

What services require data migration?

Moving from tenant to tenant involves migrating a large number of services. We would like to indicate the most commonly used types of services, which almost always require the transfer of data from the following services and services:

• Exchange Online
• SharePoint
• Microsoft Teams
• OneDrive

The total number of services that may need to be migrated is much larger and may also include Azure services such as virtual machines, databases, etc. Migration scenarios vary depending on the business needs of the customers.

Migration process

The migration process for each 365Solutions client is developed individually by our specialists. But most often it consists of the following steps:

Step 1. Project Planning

Working with a client starts with a request. You can contact us and a specialist will consult and answer any questions. After signing the contract, the preparation and planning of the data migration begins. This phase begins approximately two weeks before the actual migration. Potential problems and risks are identified. At this stage, it is extremely important to choose the right migration strategy and ensure data security.

Step 2. Preliminary analysis of the original tenant

At this stage, the identification objects in the source account are analyzed and compared. The objects are the users, groups, and teams that need to be migrated.

Step 3. Prepare the source and target tenants

Tenant-to-tenant migration means that you will have two tenants: the source tenant, from which you are migrating users and data, and the target tenant, to which you are migrating. Before performing this type of migration, the primary mail domain must be cleared from all objects in the source tenant. At this point, you need to make sure you have enough space in the target tenant, and possibly increase the number of licenses in the target Microsoft 365 account, to ensure a successful migration from the source tenant. It is important to create administrator accounts for all tenants. Some migration tools may require more than one administrator account on the source tenant to optimize data throughput.

Step 4: Run a premigration report before migrating data

Before performing the actual migration, pre-migration reporting is run to identify data that might cause problems during the migration.

Step 5. Validation and testing before migration

Because data accuracy is a key component when moving data from one tenant to another, it’s important to perform data migration and validation to make sure that all the necessary data has been transferred and that no data is lost.

Step 6. Final Migration and Transition

To minimize downtime, undeliverable emails, and user inconvenience, it’s important to determine the best migration method. Staged migration – allows you to migrate the most important information first and migrate the data of a test group of users first. Then the rest of the users and secondary information are already transferred.

Step 7 Support

Once the migration is complete, it’s important to support end users and make sure they clear their aliases and autocomplete caches. It is also important to check whether all the information was transferred correctly.

How to start?

Migrating your Microsoft 365 data can be a daunting task. With Microsoft Gold Partner 365Solutions, you can be sure that the migration process will be safe and smooth. Our team will be happy to provide you with support services as well. You may also be interested in our other services. For a consultation, please contact us or leave a request in the form below.