As the use of cloud computing continues to grow, more and more organizations are migrating to Office 365 for cloud-based communications, collaboration, and productivity features.
However, migrating your system can cause headaches and frustration when trying to navigate between old and new platforms. If you are suddenly asked to switch your email system, your employees may not be accustomed to speed. You need to make sure your data is safe while you are on the move. Also, the migration can take weeks or months. The best benefits of O365 migration is that after the migrations is completed, users are able to work from any remote location with the help of Citrix Virtual Workspace which provides virtual desktop service. This helps in increasing the flexibility and productivity of the users and which directly benefits the business.
There are many choices to think about when migrating to Office 365. In this article, we’ll categorize the different migrations types of Office 365 so you can determine the best way to do your business.
4 types of Migrations
- Staged Migration
When you migrate hosted exchange to Office 365 everything will move in batches. This process will include transferring all resource mailboxes and existing users from Exchange 2003 or 2007 to Exchange Online.
This is a great method for medium-sized businesses that are currently using Microsoft Exchange 2003 or 2007 on-premises, especially those with more than 2,000 mailboxes. Unfortunately, it’s not available for organizations using Exchange 2010 or 2013.
- Cutover Migration
A cutover migration is an immediate migration from your on-premises Exchange system to Office 365. All resources such as mailboxes, contacts, distribution groups, etc. will be migrated at once. This migration does not allow you to select specific objects to migrate. When the migrations is complete, everyone will get an Office 365 account.
This Office 365 migration method works best if you’re currently using Exchange 2003, 2007, 2010, or 2013 and your mailboxes are less than 2,000. Microsoft recommends cutover migration for companies with less than 150 users to increase the time it takes to migrate many accounts.
- Hybrid Migration
Hybrid migration allows mailboxes to move in and out of Exchange Online. You can also choose which mailboxes you want to keep local and which mailboxes you want to migrate to Office 365. You can also synchronize passwords and introduce single sign-on to your team to simplify sign-in to both environments.
If you want to use hybrid migrations, you need more than 2,000 mailboxes. Also, Exchange 2010 or later is required. Otherwise, you must have at least one on-premises Exchange 2013 or Exchange 2010 Service Pack 3 (SP3) server installed for hybrid deployment connectivity to take effect.
- IMAP Migration
While the other three Office 365 migrations types rely solely on Exchange, Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) migrations allows you to switch users from Gmail or any other email system that supports IMAP migration.
IMAP migrations has a total limit of 50,000 mailboxes and 5,000,000 items. Also, once the migration is complete, a new email sent to the original mailbox will not be migrated.
Conclusion:
If you still don’t know which Office 365 migrations type is best for you, let Apps4Rent help you with that. Apps4Rent takes full responsibility for ensuring the uptime of the Office 365 platform and also provides different migration services like SharePoint Migration Services to their customers which makes them ideal partners to choose for the services.
