It’s not easy to build an IT team from scratch and migrate 1,000 users to a new Azure tenant all at the same time. But that was the challenge faced by a renewable energy services business during a recent company-wide divestiture.
And, on top of that, it all had to be done in four months. Initially, the company understood it had 12 months to migrate, however, due to a pending enterprise agreement renewal, the timeframe shrunk drastically by two-thirds.
Challenges In Tenant Migration
As businesses evolve through growth, mergers, or restructuring, the need for Microsoft tenant-to-tenant migrations is becoming more common. A tenant contains the users, groups, devices, domains, subscriptions, and configuration settings for an organization’s requirements. A tenant-to-tenant migration for a divesture, typically involves splitting out and transferring one legal entity’s information to a new Microsoft tenant.
Tenant to tenant projects are invariably complex engagements, and this one had an added challenge─ the company needed to accomplish the move, all while hiring and ramping up an inhouse IT team to manage the Azure infrastructure. Thus, consideration needed to be given to the training and change management aspect of the migration as much as to the technical implementation.
Enter JourneyTeam
The company reached out to JourneyTeam to help shepherd them through the entire process. With our Azure environment expertise and migration experience, JourneyTeam was the ideal advisor and partner for the effort.
Comprehensive Planning
Identifying data to be migrated during a divestiture can be difficult. Shared Teams and SharePoint sites needed to be reviewed by stakeholders and in some cases legal teams to determine if they could be migrated to the divested organization.
JourneyTeam worked closely with the company upfront to understand these requirements and develop a comprehensive approach to ensure that essential data, including emails, documents, and collaboration spaces, retained integrity and accessibility throughout the migration process. In addition, the project also included migrating Power BI reports and the Dynamics 365 application and data.
With all those moving pieces, a change management plan was essential to ensure user adoption, guaranteeing that all users were aware of the overall migration process, and when, where, and how their data could be accessed. With many remote field workers, communication and knowledge transfer was an imperative.
Security is King
One of the most common misconfigurations for any cloud deployment is to have far too many users with privileges to resources they should not have. JourneyTeam collaborated intensively with the company to develop a zero-trust security approach when building out their new Entra ID tenant.
The Zero Trust approach involves doing away with implicit trust and constantly validating every level of a digital connection to safeguard the organization. JourneyTeam implemented processes to evaluate all end points of access and enforce the minimum- security access levels that employees needed to complete their tasks. Finally, JourneyTeam put in place telemetry and segmentation processes so they could immediately respond to potential threats.
From zero trust security to data migration, JourneyTeam trained the new IT team to handle the intricacies of the Azure environment, providing best practice guidance and support along the way, and acting as a trusted resource.
Streamlining Employee Onboarding
Onboarding new employees had always been a time consuming and challenging process for the company. In the past, they were burdened with extreme delays in providing provisioned computers to new employees. It often took days or weeks before employees were fully onboarded with the appropriate access and credentials.
The tenant migration project provided the perfect opportunity for JourneyTeam to automate the employee onboarding and access management process and reduce manual tasks. The automation also reduced the risk of errors and inconsistencies often seen in manual processes.
Outcomes
Throughout the process, JourneyTeam does what’s best for the client because they are invested in our success…We trusted them to reach our timeline, communicate any budget/scoping changes, and to train our users on secure best practices.
Vice President of IT
By partnering with JourneyTeam, the company was able to complete the migration within the accelerated timeframe, and at the same time maintain business continuity, leverage cloud capabilities, and create a solid foundation for future scalability. It was an impressive feat for all project participants.
In addition, with complete confidence in JourneyTeam’s migration experts, the company was able to focus more on creating and building a new IT team and take on the corporate needs of their divestiture, while JourneyTeam focused on meeting the tight timeline.
Moving Forward
Tenant-to-tenant migrations are a complex yet required undertaking for organizations undergoing structural changes. When migrating tenants, small and medium business owners need a solution that can scale without large capital expenditures, while protecting data and providing a positive user experience.
An experienced solutions provider like JourneyTeam can help you implement effective strategies and best practices to ensure a successful migration so you can achieve maximum benefit from your Microsoft 365 investment. Reach out to us today!