Software

Migrate Exchange 2010 to Office 365 Challenges

Office 365

More and more businesses are looking to migrate Exchange 2010 to Office 365 to move from an on-premises server to a server hosted in the cloud. This is to facilitate mobile workers who need to access data while on the go in different geographical locations. This transition involves many challenges ranging from stalled migration to compliance and security issues. Let’s explore these challenges in more detail to get a better idea of what they entail.

Disruption of Cloud and On-Premises Environments

In order to migrate Exchange 2010 to Office 365 you need to possess excellent knowledge of both cloud deployments and on-premise solutions. Hybrid migrations require expertise in handling both on-premises servers and cloud hosted servers for the migration to be successful. Mistakes in hybrid migration can result in synchronization challenges, authentication issues, and lagging performance for both cloud and on-premises environments.

Security and Compliance Issues

Moving from an on-premise solution that requires choosing the right hard drives, servers, network cables, and server rooms to a cloud hosted environment can pose a risk to data security. This is because it requires releasing control over your data and entrusting it to a third-party service provider. For this reason, it is important for migration partners to follow best practices and obtain certifications in order to be completely compliant with industry standards like ISO 27001, HIPAA, FISMA, and EUMC. 

Complexity of Custom Solutions Migration

Custom solutions are developed to cater to a specific need that cannot be met with standard software solutions. For this reason, moving on-premises custom solutions to the cloud can be a difficult task as it does not follow the same rules. In most cases, to migrate Exchange 2010 to Office 365, you require additional development efforts to develop, reset, and tune the existing customizations to align with the requirements of the cloud environment. This can be fairly time-consuming and resource intensive in nature.

Office 365 User Adoption

To migrate Exchange 2010 to Office 365 successfully, it is imperative that there is user adoption from the very beginning. Poor user adoption can undermine your migration efforts even if the migration itself is successful. To prevent the rejection or avoid poor adoption, training sessions are required for diverse groups of users to help them understand how to use Office 365 for project management, day-to-day processes, content management, and collaboration.

Stalled Migration

It is very easy to Exchange migration to Office 365 without much planning, however, be prepared to face some severe consequences as a result. If you fail to conduct a preliminary assessment of the state of your business’ existing deployment, underestimate the sheer complexity of this migration process, or miscalculate the capabilities of your internal IT specialists, your migration will be stalled. To prevent this from happening, it is vital that you conduct in-depth assessments and plan the entire migration process from beginning to end.

Although it may seem easy to migrate Exchange 2010 to Office 365 in one go, the reality of the matter is that the migration can be quite complex. If the planning stage is not given enough consideration or you overestimate the competence of your IT experts, it could easily spell disaster for your business. It is also imperative that the solution is actually adopted by the users for the migration to be a success. Any security issues that arise may need to be addressed by following the right best practices and obtaining the certifications needed to meet compliance and industry standards. Lagging performance and authentication issues may also arise if there is insufficient knowledge available to correctly migrate from one environment to the other. Although these challenges might appear to be insurmountable, with the right planning and expertise in place, migrating from Exchange 2010 to Office 365 can be a breeze. For such critical IT operations whether it is Exchange to Office 365 Migration or a SharePoint Migration, it is advised to choose a reliable IT service provider with years of expertise in performing such complex tasks and with a 24*7 migration support.

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