Planning to migrate to Office 365 or ‘Cloud’ from an on-premises environment will bring an impressive array of enterprise level functionality to your small/mid siz business. An organisation can utilise compelling benefits by migrating their emails or docs to one single server, hosted in Microsoft Public Cloud i.e. ‘Office 365’.

Office 365 is one of the hottest trends to create, communicate and share any information on Cloud. You may be wondering if it’s needed at this point in your company? Is it even right for small/mid organisation? What happens to all third party applications that we are currently using?

Here are some of the answers:

Office 365 makes it feasible to access your organisation’s data anytime and anywhere in the world. Check out their key benefits that will convince you towards buying this product:

• Easy to create, communicate, and share information on Cloud.
• Continue to use essential and most popular Microsoft programs like Word, Outlook, OneNote, Excel, Publisher and PowerPoint.
• Documents synchronisation on numerous platforms.
• Easy collaboration among team-mates in remote locations.
• Ability to access all organisations’ service any time, anywhere.
• It can greatly reduce your company’s IT infrastructure cost.
• No need to hire costly data managers to maintain systems.

 

These benefits clearly indicate that switching to Office 365 is a smart decision for any organisation. However, some remain doubtful about the transition process, as transition itself presents several roadblocks. Below are 5 biggest roadblocks that you may come across and effective solutions to overcome them:

 

1. Legacy Archive APIs: Most of us use legacy archive’s built-in application programming interface (API) to extract data. Some APIs slow down your system and may corrupt all your healthy data. Similar types of problems may occur continuously to multiple users.

 

Solution: IT managed companies use their own API-based Archive extraction tool to avoid repeated problems of data loss. Generally, it needs to skip the API based extraction and should follow the binary extraction techniques to brisk extraction of all useful & healthy data.

 

2. Internet Speed Inhibition: Another big issue that may arise when transferring a large amount of data over the Internet is speed. It takes a long time for completing a migration process that may be caused due to lack of bandwidth.

 

Solution: To avoid these nasty surprises, we use effective migration tools. These tools can work even without high-speed internet connection. Office 365 imports the data through multiple switches and once the final switch is attempted, your mail or data is ready to view in your Outlook window.

 

3. Unknown Security Fears: It is a question of sensitive data. All organisations might be concerned for security hazards while transferring from their on-premises or corporate owned email servers to file sharing environment.

 

Solution: First of all, involve stakeholder at the earliest to avoid unforeseen security concerns or delay in migrations. You can also take help from Office 365 Trust Centre. It is a great source of technical consulting and support.

 

4. Journal Archives and Non-Exchange Data Formats: Generally, journal archives are not compatible with Office 365 mailbox. Most organisation fears about non-supporting data format in their mailbox. Traditional archive migration tools don’t convert journal archives to mailbox tool.

 

Solution: Its solution can be unifying emails. Manage user expectations through the transition process and then back it up by introducing new programs such as file sharing programs to replace oversized email attachments.

 

5. Retaining On-Premises Environment Along with Office 365: This situation occurs when a company wants to keep their old on-premises environment too. In such cases, a hybrid solution is needed as transition cannot be straight forwarded applied to all systems.

 

Solution: An optimised solution can be achieved through implementing a single sign-on with Active Directory Federation Service to get working with both Office 365 and on-premises environment.

 

Migrating to Office 365 is a multi-phased project and it often requires expert technical consulting and support. At ICTechnology, we can help you to switch to ‘Cloud’ with minimal business disruption or downtime. Our comprehensive technical support is available to you all time and everywhere. Moreover, our business solutions are based around your unique business and budget.

 

If you are looking to migrate to Office 365 but are worried about the most heard challenges, please contact us today. We would be happy to work with you to maintain your system and answer your queries.