Microsoft Office 365 Migration

today's whiteboard session is going to be a high-level overview of Microsoft Office 365 here we have a traditional infrastructure with the standard layout starting at the top you have your file servers which will serve multiple roles within your environment you will have your user home drives you also have shared storage that can be utilized across your environment second you have Active Directory this controls all of your users and your authentication both internally and your remote users utilizing VPN coming in you have your exchange server which is your mail server that's used to communicate both internally across your environment as well as clients and your external users going along with your exchange you also need a mail archive this will store all of your old mail based on whatever retention policies you have set and with that you're going to need some sort of backup attached to that whether it be paper backup to disk then you also have all of your end-users that are over here utilizing all of this infrastructure internally whether there's the connectivity or not so let's talk about some of the challenges that revolve around an infrastructure such as this first of all with all of these servers just in this small scale version we have eight physical servers that's a lot of maintenance for a single individual which is what you would probably have for something of this size second thing you need to take into account is your server migrations or upgrades and that goes for operating systems and software of any kind utilized within your environment the third thing you need to take into account is all of this is required by your end-users which means you have to have some sort of backup disaster recovery or some sort of off site usage capability and then the final component that becomes a major challenge is resources you have power cooling and network that all is utilized by every one of these devices now that you've decided to migrate what's next evaluation the first thing that you must do is take a look at your current environment to make sure that it supports the cloud-based solutions that you are investigating so what items should you and your team be evaluating well you need to start with network traffic capabilities the internet speed versions of software both server and user based which both matter user count the data size the user roles and the needs of each one of those users the next items to be identified as who and what will be affected by this migration when it comes to the who you should break things down by department user type location and primary work location when it comes to the what you should make a list of what will change and how it will change not just for your users but also for you as the administrator everything will be affected in your network from where your files are stored to how your users authenticate to specific resources where the mail flow comes from how things are archived and how your remote users interact with your network and the resources that used to be inside your network then you need to evaluate licensing needs based on the list that you've made you should be able to determine the licensing needs of those users one of the best updates made to office 365 last year was the ability to mix and match licensing which means you're no longer bound to one type of license for all of your users which can be a huge cost saving benefit to your environment so let's take a minute to talk about the different types of migrations that you could utilize within your environment the first one is a remote move migration you will use this for one of two reasons if you're going to do an exchange hybrid deployment with mailboxes both on-premise and cloud based or if you're going to move mailboxes over a long period of time this is supported by exchange 2010 and later or if you have more than two thousand mailboxes your next option is a staged migration you will use this if you're planning to move all your mailboxes to exchange online over a period of time but this option is only supported when exchange 2003 or 2007 your third option is a cutover migration this is a short-term migration where users will be migrated in one batch and then cut over in a single swoop this is used for mm or less mailboxes and when the users identity will be managed in office 365 the final one is an IMAP migration this is used for other types of messaging systems other than exchange such as AOL Lotus or Google Mail just to name a few examples so now that we know what type of migrations exist let me show you a bit about what your infrastructure could look like and how the migration data will flow let's start with one of the components that's actually been added if you notice we have what's referred to as an ingest server basically what this ingest server will do during your migration is it will take your mail out of exchange process it and then upload into your office 365 tenant the purpose of this design however is to make sure that during the migration process which normally happens during business hours is not taxing to your server and doesn't affect your end users one of the most common questions that I'm asked is are there other ways to do this and the short answer is yes but there are a lot of items that need to be taken into account when making a decision as to which solution you go with during your migration the final piece is at what point does this additional infrastructure get moved well all of this gets taken out once you're ready to do your final cut over to your cloud-based solution let's take a look at your environment post migration the first thing you'll notice is the decreased amount of infrastructure for you to manage maintain and upgrade this leads to increased operational efficiencies so how do we do that let's start with our file server as you notice we've only got one listed here basically what we've done is we have now taken all of our shared files and we've moved them to SharePoint Online in office 365 then we've taken all of our users home drives and we have moved those to onedrive for business in office 365 as you notice we only have a single Active Directory server we do have the possibility of a second depending on the amount of load that you need for internal based applications but for our purposes we'll only utilize one all of your remote users plus everyone that is accessing cloud based services is authenticating to your Azure Active Directory as opposed to your internal Active Directory those to synchronize together so every time a user changes their password here it automatically updates an office 365 one of the biggest components you will notice is missing is your exchange server and the need for your mail archive neither one of those are needed because those services are actually handled by office 365 as well your remote users are no longer fully connected into your environment at all times they are authenticating directly to add your Active Directory utilizing all of these cloud-based services that you've moved out to here as a matter of fact the only reason that these users would need to connect into your environment is if you have internal based applications that these users are using this is just a high-level overview with the basic considerations of an office 365 migration a project such as this requires a detailed approach when developing your migration strategy to begin your transition to the cloud contact our team at data networks we're available to assist you with your environment assessment at any time

Channel: DataNetworksInc

Views: 198,229

Keywords: “Microsoft Office 365 Migration”, “Microsoft Office 365”, “Office 365 Migration”, “Data Center Optimization”, “Transition to the Cloud”, “Remote Move Migration”, “Staged Migration”, “Cutover Migration”, “IMAP Migration”, Microsoft Office (Software), Microsoft Office 365 (Software), Microsoft Corporation (Venture Funded Company), Software (Industry), “Data Networks”, “http://www.datanetworks.com”

Id: ZtZyQkTmOIw

Length: 8min 16sec (496 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 21 2015