Migrate to SharePoint Online & Office 365 !
SharePoint Online – the most powerful and rapidly growing platform typically used for enterprise collaboration along with Office 365 are becoming the popular ways to connect with experts across the globe, organize information, engage with people, share ideas and reinvent the way individuals across an enterprise work together in sync. In the rat race to rapidly adopt cloud technologies, many organizations are considering to dump their on-premises file servers and previous versions of SharePoint so as to switch to the cloud environment by adopting either SharePoint Online or Office 365.
Considering the above numbers, I’m quite sure that most of the enterprises that are preparing to move to the cloud are still finding answers to critical questions like – How they should proceed towards secure migration?, What are the Cloud Migration challenges they’re likely to encounter in the long run? What they should do to quickly turn their organization into a cloud friendly enterprise?
This blog discusses some of the extremely important things that you must take into account before you jump to the cloud – whether SharePoint Online or Office 365.
1) Taking the first crucial step – Conduct a Pre-Migration Analysis
Performing migration without proper analysis of data that you intend to migrate is one of the biggest security risks that no organization would ever want to take with their important information. Conducting a pre-migration analysis helps an enterprise in many ways. Besides checking the compatibility, it helps you optimize the whole migration plan along with processes so as to pre-identify the probability of a successful move, identify potential migration issues that one may encounter during the whole operation and get an overview of content so as to plan how much storage you will need in the cloud to accommodate your data.
2) Checking the state of your current data is important before Cloud Migration
Yes, you heard that right!! Before you even think to migrate, it’s important to check the state of your current data (both information & content), know whether your files & folders are evenly structured, estimate the probable speed of migration to get an idea about the time that the migration operation will take and investigate if the migration would be actually beneficial for your enterprise.
Though it’s a time-consuming task to conduct a check on the current content state, it still plays a significant role in detecting the migration performance whether you’re looking to move specifically to SharePoint Online or adopt the full Cloud suite – Office 365. One way to perform this crucial check is by organizing workshops with individuals who actually understand the content structure; how it can be stored & what are the ways to plan reorganization of the whole information architecture in the best possible way.
3) Learning about new features and how to use them is critical for Cloud Success
You can’t just jump to the cloud because you’ve decided to move your data and people around you are quickly transitioning to the new online system. For improved performance and smooth workflow even after performing the migration process, you must get hands on training about the comprehensive features that the platform offers to its users. After all, what’s the use to spend thousands of dollars in switching your data from one place to another and scratch your head later when you face difficulties in maintaining the whole infrastructure and managing workflows & communication on the cloud? Definitely nothing! So, it’s better to first know how to jump to the cloud, deal with the new challenges and then take the transition !!
4) The Cost Factor – Evaluate what it costs to migrate to the Cloud and also evaluate the maintenance overheads
Last, but not the least, don’t forget to evaluate the cost factor of both migration and maintenance. Immediately after you finalize your cloud architecture, you must plan your cloud expenses beforehand like whether you would like to pay for monthly Office 365 subscription or annual fees, evaluating the cost according to storage space needed for your content, what would the overheads involved in maintaining the applications & services afterwards and what are your backup and restore needs. Evaluating all this is important to figure out whether cloud would turn to be actually cost-effective for your organization or not. There’s no point to migrate only to know later that you’re unable to maintain your new online system within your estimated budget and then repent later. It’s better to first know how things work in the cloud, how much it would cost you and then consider to take the big move.