Office 365 migrations are complicated, and mistakes are significantly increased when readiness evaluations are disregarded. The preparation process is essential for a successful migration. This includes understanding and evaluating your current infrastructure, considering dependencies, evaluating final cloud costs, adjusting technical necessities to the migrated environment, and using automated assessment tools. Let's look at some important aspects of the preparation phase.

Comprehending your existing Exchange environment

The starting step is to design your on-premises Exchange for migration and meet your existing on-premises Exchange inventory. This includes the number of mailboxes, storage locations, client devices, operating systems that host email systems, and so on. All dependency mappings between users, mailbox data size estimates, and all other data should be examined before execution begins.

Preparing your Exchange environment

If there are problems with your existing Exchange environment, such as user access issues, slow mailbox performance, database corruption backup problems, then it's time to take corrective measures. Such a situation calls for suitable solutions to ensure the effective functioning of the system. Before beginning the migration process, you should make sure your existing environment is in optimum condition. This involves checking for existing problems and ensuring these are fixed before migrating. It's important to take care of any issues before proceeding with the migration. Staying on top of the latest updates for your Exchange servers is essential to have a safe and secure environment. It's one of the best practices to ensure that your digital infrastructure is as secure as possible.

Understand your compliance requirements

Before you commence your migration, it's important to be aware of the data governance, regulations, and laws in place. While the compliance laws might differ across different countries, they usually include email security, freedom of information, and data retention restrictions.

Picking the right migration type and option

When migrating on-premises Exchange to Office 365, many migration options are available. It is convenient to choose from several migration options depending on your requirements and suitability. Choosing a migration method depends on many factors, including Runtime migration or coexistence requirements as well as available budget. Microsoft recommends choosing from various options for migrating emails and mailboxes to Office 365.

Conclusion:
Many hosting providers offer cloud solutions, but migration services are difficult and you need to find the best way to handle the whole migration process. Hosting service providers such as Apps4Rent take all the responsibility for ensuring the availability of the Office 365 platform.