Effective execution of Tenant-to-Tenant Migrations for organizations undergoing Mergers and Acquisitions.

The nature of deal making among businesses is being fundamentally reshaped. With a record high of over $2.8 trillion worth of mergers and acquisitions being reported in the first half of 2021, with an increase of 131% in the number of deals from year-ago levels. 

Companies are beginning to engage in new kinds of deals, including partnerships, joint ventures, and other alternative investments which hold intrinsic and long-term value for their enterprises.  

This has accentuated the importance of adaptability and flexibility in the organization’s internal and external ecosystems. 

And, because a large number of organizations have transitioned to the Cloud or hybrid environment, likely, the next merger or acquisition will almost certainly necessitate integrating two cloud IT environments — in other words, a tenant-to-tenant migration and consolidation. 

In scenarios such as mergers and acquisitions, rebranding and divestitures, consolidation of two Microsoft 365 or Office 365 tenants may need to be done to achieve full collaboration and reduce complexities in business operations.  

To ensure the success of your enterprise’s migration, Accounts, mails, and shared data of your organization must be migrated safely, accurately, efficiently, and with minimal disruption to the business. 

This blog will serve as a helpful guide to map out the challenges that may crop up during the process of tenant-to-tenant migration and suggests some best practices concerning the same. 

Success Factors in a Key Migration 

1. Maintain productivity for both organizations in an M&A situation 
2. Keep collaboration up with merging environments 
3. Limit impacts to end-users 
4. Set an efficient and effective timeline of migration 
5. Meet surprising deadlines in a divestiture 

Case Study

Unlock valuable insights with this compelling case study: “Managing and Migrating Office 365 Tenant for Spin-off.” Discover how we facilitated a successful transition, paving the way for enhanced productivity and efficiency. Read the full case study now!

https://www.trndigital.com/tenant-migration/

Combating Obstacles to Ensure a Successful Migration 

1. Set Up Backup  

Backing up the source and target environments is the first step in every migration. Such a backup strategy must include on-premise assets as well as cloud assets that are vital for your company.  

No matter how well-planned your migration strategy might be, there is a possibility of some unpleasant surprises. For this, a backup and the ability to roll back migration can help minimize the effect on users. 

To avoid the disruption of critical business processes, a backup mechanism must be configured. 

2. Define the Scope of Migration 

Prepare a complete and detailed inventory of all the accounts that you intend to migrate. The Migrations team will need to chart out the granular details of what is required to be migrated – whether only the accounts or email or if the OneDrive data is needed as well?  

After charting this out, one would need to identify what types of data within these categories need to be migrated – whether old archived legacy data would be needed or not. 

3. Determine What to Migrate  

Avoid deactivated accounts, old archives, and data that are no longer of use to avoid wasting resources and adding unnecessary security risks during the process of migration. By adding on additional data that would not be of any use, it would risk cluttering the target environment, thereby making administration harder. 

4. Collaboration Across Divisions 

Remember that migration is a business project, not a project concerning the IT team only. If a significant portion of data is left behind, it would pose a major business risk and threaten performance metrics. Therefore, users and other teams in the enterprise must be looped in on migration plans to avoid disruptions to business processes.  

A combined effort with the IT team spearheading the technical know-hows and implementations for migration would prove to be successful. 

5. Migration Management 

Many organizations fail to prioritize administration, resulting in a significant amount of time spent accumulating and coordinating status updates from the various people involved in the migration project. There must be robust communication between different teams of the organization. A simple omnichannel dashboard that can help the migrations team communicate to the other stakeholders, including high-level management, would prove useful in this regard. 

Making and Executing Your Migration Plan 

Before initiating the migration process, there is a series of preparatory steps that need to be followed. These pre-migration steps ensure the migration process has a smooth completion. 

Step 1: Target Domain Preparation 

• The target tenant’s Office 365 must have sufficient space to accommodate all the data from the source tenet. In some cases, this might require additional licenses to be acquired. 
• Next, an administrator account should be opened on the source tenant and the target tenant. Some migration tools will require additional admin accounts. 
• In the target tenant, create user mailboxes, resource mailboxes, and distribution groups. 
• Sometimes it is necessary to use Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) tools for AD DS consolidation. This is followed by data synchronization between the source domain and target domain. 
• Finally, the end-users are trained to use the post-migration Office 365. 

Step 2: Domain Verification 

• Initiate the verification process of the target domain on Office 365.  
• The source domain is then added to the admin center in the target Office 365. TXT records are also created in the DNS at this stage. 
• There is a chance that the verification process may fail. Therefore, the domain must be used for only one target tenant. 
• Now, it will take 72 hours for the changes to be implemented. 

Step 3: Planning the Migration 

• First, generate a list of user mailboxes that need to be migrated, along with a CSV file for mapping. 
• Next, identify the lowest value of Time To Live (TTL) from the Mail Exchanger (MX) record in the primary email domain. 
• The directory sync on the source tenant should then be disabled. 

Step 4: Migration Support 

• Based on the lowest TTL value, set an unreachable value in the primary MX records. This will stop inbound mails to the source tenant. 
• Before transferring the Office 365 mailboxes to the target account, all objects in the primary mail domain of the source tenant must be erased. 
• An hour after all previous steps are completed, verify the source tenant in the target domain. This is the final step to prepare the target domain. 
• If an Active Directory Federation Service (AD FS) is in use, a new domain must be created for the AD FS in the target tenant. 
• The admins must activate the new users in the target domain and assign the new licenses. 
• The new users will have their primary email addresses as the source domain. Ensure the new passwords are communicated to access the same. 

Migration Methods

After the pre-migration process, there are two methods for migration. The ideal methods differ based on the total number of users involved. 

1. Migration of fewer than 500 users 

The volume of data to be migrated can be limited through a cut-off date. A fixed period can be set for migrating emails, calendars, and contact information. 

2. Migration of over 500 users 

The migration process will tend to be longer as the data to be transferred is significantly larger. To be more efficient, admins can use the multi-pass approach to migration. It entails migrating crucial data like emails, calendars, and contact information first, ideally within a short period such as a week. The users can then begin using the new target domain as the remaining data migrates in the background. 

Conclusion

Migrations are a complicated task with several moving components that need to be dealt with carefully. Planning to the details and implementation is crucial for minimizing friction in the migration process. 

TrnDigital can help your organization with establishing a cloud strategy and determining the best approach to migrating your platforms or applications, and leveraging all of the benefits that the cloud has to offer.