A Microsoft 365 tenant migration for a cybersecurity company who went through an acquisition

The Challenge

The subject company acquired a leading provider of cybersecurity services and inherited its diverse book of business. As part of the acquisition, the subject company sought to integrate the acquiree's Microsoft 365 infrastructure with its own. This was no small task, as it involved multiple workloads and about 400 mailboxes.

Immediately after the acquisition, employees at the newly merged companies had to adapt by switching between the new and legacy company’s tenants – which caused myriad problems, including a breakdown of communication caused by missed IMs that were sent into one tenant but not the other.

With the inherent workflow disconnect and the added cost of paying for licensing in both tenants, management knew a migration was needed. However, its Integration Management Office was already swamped with other mission-critical IT projects and simply could not take on another.

The challenge for Netwoven: Could it accomplish the merger – and all its associated benefits – in a seamless and non-disruptive fashion, while providing unified experiences for all employees in SharePoint, Teams, Exchange, OneDrive, M365 Groups, and Stream?

The Solution

With its best-in-class expertise in Tenant migrations and other workloads, Netwoven was a logical choice for this project. An initial deep dive was conducted to analyze the entire source Microsoft 365 tenant and Azure subscription, including workloads that were not thought to be in use. To do this, Netwoven compared the source tenant settings to the destination to discover adoption challenges and user-impacting security controls.

Once the tally was completed, Netwoven identified more than 2.3TB of mailbox data, 774GB of SharePoint data, 1.9TB of content within corporate OneDrive accounts, 1.7TB of Teams data, and 20GB of Stream data. The resulting project plan – which covered a 3-1/2-week period – would migrate all this data and accomplish these additional tasks:

• Re-architecture of the SharePoint sites midflight to match the destination's information architecture
• Archiving of Teams that were no longer relevant or in use in the destination
• Issuance of communications via email, news articles, and IMs throughout the project to keep user's change fatigue at a minimum

Benefits

The thorough assessment Netwoven performed ensured all parties understood the scope and limitations of the migration tooling and prepared the company for the intense, 3½ week work cycle that resulted in a flawless migration, with minimal impact and disruption. Both the legacy and acquired companies were happy with the migration speed, quality, and minimal dependency on internal resources.

Today, users no longer need to bounce back and forth between tenants because of this “Big Bang” approach implemented by Netwoven; and, equally as important, the acquired company was able to reduce its licensing costs significantly on the source tenant.