What is the recommended migration approach?

Question

What is the recommended migration approach?

Answer

CloudM Migrate gives you extensive flexibility when migrating to either Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. It is therefore extremely important that you test the migration and available options. As part of the testing process it is recommended that you size your migration to get a rough estimate of the duration of the migration.

Please ensure that you have also read all pre-requiste articles prior to starting any migration so that you are aware of any potential issues or watchpoints. 

Company Announcement – 1 – 3 months before Go-Live

• Inform the whole company via email and on the Intranet of the new and exciting developments.
• Inform users that all their email data will be migrated

Pre-migration Testing – 1 – 3 months before Go-Live

• Test migration to options
• Test migration throughput

Request for Pilot Users – 1 – 2 months before Go-Live

• In the Google Workspace environment, these users are called “Google Guides”.
• These users (Google Guides) will be the company’s internal advocate of the new service.
• They will act as a local point of contact and help with the internal change control.

Phase 1 – Historical Migration – 1 – 2 months before Go-Live

• The initial migration is when the bulk of the historical data is migrated over to the destination. We recommend that this only include email and file data (where applicable), calendar and contacts data should be migrated at the delta stage. This is because that data changes frequently and may be deleted, moved, or updated etc. We also recommend that you leave a “Working Window” of around 30 days from today's date for email migration for the same reason.
• Users do not need to know that their data is being migrated. CloudM Migrate is non-intrusive and non-destructive, it will not remove any data from the source system, it will only copy data to the destination.

1 week before Go-Live

• Reduce the TTL expiration of MX records.
• Communicate to all users of the upcoming data migration and Go-Live.

Go-Live Day

• Switch MX records to new system
• Perform Delta Migration

Phase 2 – Delta Migration

Migrate remaining email, files, contacts and calendar data. Email previously migrated will not be re-migrated, but the statistics for the whole migration will be recorded. 

This allows you to provide users with a full report of the volume of data migrated.

File data will be updated if it has been changed in the source since the bulk migration.