Taking your on-premise SharePoint environment to
SharePoint online on Office 365 makes sense to many organizations, but often there is a great deal of uncertainty surrounding what it will involve. Some common considerations are:
- Will I be able to migrate all my data to the cloud?
- Will my data be safe in the cloud?
- How long will it take to migrate the data?
- How can I migrate to the cloud?
It would be unwise to begin the whole process before getting answers to these questions. In this blog I will go through each of these points, so that you will hopefully be better equipped to handle your migration.
Will I be able to migrate all my files to the cloud?
It’s likely your organization has lots of files and documents in different formats that have been created at different times in the past using different versions of MS SharePoint. Before you make any move towards Office 365, you will need to know if all your files can be migrated. In a hybrid deployment, content can be split between online and on-premise, as needed.
Will my data be safe in the cloud?
If you are a small or medium sized business, Office 365 will probably give you more security than you can afford on your own. The Cloud provides you with encrypted data transmissions and highly secure data centres that are governed by the strictest security and compliance standards such as ISO, PCI-DSS, HIPAA and FERPA.
How long will it take to migrate?
This is dependent on many things including the volume of data and the scope of the migration i.e. whether Exchange Public Folders are to be migrated are not. Upload bandwidth of the network, and number of servers from which the migration job will run in parallel, will also determine the length of time it will take. You can’t perform this analysis natively, if you want to be sure of the time it will take then there are third party
SharePoint migration tools that can help.
How can I migrate to the cloud?
Make sure you have a plan:
- Decide what has to be migrated:
You might have a lot of documents spread across different servers at different locations – you need to decide which of these documents have to be migrated.
- Have a continuity plan:
Create a list of the tasks you complete on the on-premise SharePoint. All employees involved in dealing with files and folders that have to be migrated need to collectively create an organisational task chart that should be verified with the Office 365 implementation team.
- Plan the architecture:
Decide what will go where. Which documents can be kept in siloes and which ones should be shared?
- Granular or One-time migration:
With a granular approach, you will be able to see the data building up in the target environment as the migration progresses, and you can fine-tune your approach if required. Alternatively, you can use the one-time cut-over migration is fast and usually lets you take control of the target environment quicker.
Begin the migration:
- Metadata migration:
Analyze and understand the metadata of the files and folders, and how they should be mapped between the on-premise SharePoint and SharePoint online on Office 365. Understand the user permissions and their mappings in the on-premise systems and SharePoint online.
- Migrate what’s important:
You don’t need to migrate everything on the on-premise SharePoint to SharePoint on Office 365. You need to make sure that the SharePoint on Office 365 stores only essential items, such as those that require collaboration or sharing. Old data and backups that are barely used can be better left on the on-premise servers.
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