Kick-start your business case for email migration to Microsoft Exchange Online

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Executive summary 3

Problem statements 7

Analysis of the situation 13

Solution overview 22

Project description 30

Costs 68

Recommendation 70

Contents

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

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Moving to a cloud-based email solution can seem daunting. If you’re part of a larger business you’ll have to break down the pros and cons so that all stakeholders clearly understand the business case for cloud migration.

If you are an IT consultant or a small business owner, you or your clients may be wary of making the leap to cloud. Our experience has been that customers and IT partners want to move to cloud services but are reluctant to risk the smooth operation of their critical IT.

According to technology analysts Bloor Research, those doubts are justified. They say more than a third (38%) of data migration projects fail.

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For 11 years now we’ve been migrating customers to a wide range of clouds solutions so we know that with good planning and a reliable IT partner, you shouldn’t experience any unplanned disruption to your business.

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More than a third (38%) of data migration projects fail“

- Bloor Research

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PROBLEM STATEMENT

The problem with relying on your on-premises server

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The move from in-house servers to the cloud is today more of a ‘when’ than an ‘if’.

Cloud migration is becoming increasingly urgent in organisations where on-premises equipment is holding back business growth. It’s even putting businesses at risk, as Microsoft gradually withdraws all support and security updates to small business servers.

By doing nothing, many businesses no longer meet industry compliance standards and could find themselves in breach of the Data Protection Act.

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With a £500,000 fine from the ICO in the balance, businesses are flocking towards migration to Microsoft Exchange Online, part of the Office 365 suite.

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Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful

processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data.

- The Data Protection Act

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In 2013, more than 70% of companies surveyed by IDC were using, planning, or researching cloud strategies – and that figure continues to increase.

Buying and managing physical servers can be expensive and a pain.

They’re costly, and they take up space, time and resources that few businesses can afford if they want to remain competitive.

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Compared to the flexibility, scalability and security of cloud technology, moving to a cloud-based solution is often the obvious choice for today’s businesses.

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ANALYSIS OF THE SITUATION

Why move from onsite email exchange?

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You know it’s time to consider moving to a cloud based email solution is if you’re running a legacy Microsoft Exchange versions such as 2003 or 2007. Especially if you’re using the Small Business Server (SBS) variants of Exchange Server.

Microsoft has already pulled the plug on security and technical support for SBS 2003, and the plan is to do the same over time with all other small business servers. That means you’ll no longer receive new security updates, hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options, or online technical content updates.

With what is effectively now an insecure server, all your data, applications and processes are highly vulnerable to attack. Your email, document storage and business applications are all at risk. This means your Sage Accounts, CAD Drawings or legal case management software, for example, are exposed. Yes, your server may still function, but basically it’s a ticking time bomb.

Your server is - or soon will be - unsupported1

15Q Why is Microsoft no longer supporting legacy servers?

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The reason for pulling support is simple:

Microsoft wants small-medium organisations to move to Office 365,

their all-singing, all-dancing cloud suite

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As well as Exchange Online, Office 365 provides business users with a broad range of cloud based Microsoft products such as Sharepoint Online for collaboration and sharing, Skype for Business and Office Pro 2016 – the latest version of the Office suite.

As extended support for older versions of Microsoft Exchange expires, your business email systems will become increasingly fragile.

The ability to maintain the Exchange in a healthy working order is compromised and backup and restore operations are undermined.

This is particularly serious if you or any of your customers are in regulated sectors such as finance, law or healthcare. You could find yourself in breach of industry regulations if, say, you no longer comply with the FCA’s business continuity requirements or the Data Protection Act.

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Office 365’s Exchange Online is a lot cheaper to run than an onsite Exchange Server.

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) plummets with Exchange Online since you no longer face costs for hardware, maintenance and upgrades.

And, as with all things cloud, it’s based on a flexible monthly subscription, so you know exactly what you’re paying each month and can scale, depending on your business requirements from one month to the next.

You want to cut costs and manage resources2

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Most workforces are becoming increasingly mobile, and with the uptake of employees using their own devices for work (called BYOD – or Bring Your Own Device), people should expect to be able to work from anywhere, at any time on any device.

With Exchange Online – and the entire Office 365 suite of products – you can access and work on documents from anywhere. You don’t have to rely on accessing your servers or applications in your office.

Your business is becoming increasingly mobile3

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47% of all employees now use their smartphone, tablet, PC or other portable

device for work purposes.

- YouGov

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Historically, you or your IT partner would typically be responsible for expensive onsite anti-spam and anti-virus hardware to protect the business’ Exchange Server, plus any backup or disaster recovery solutions for continuity of email.

All the more reason to move to a platform like Exchange Online where resilience and redundancy are inherent to the solution. Microsoft guarantees 99.9% uptime on their Office 365 suite – and Exchange Online also includes anti-spam and anti-virus.

Security is a priority4

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SOLUTION OVERVIEW

Microsoft Exchange Online

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Microsoft Exchange Online is the most popular email and collaboration platform used by businesses around the world to manage emails, meetings, calendars, contacts and tasks.

Until now, it has been difficult for small-medium businesses to adopt it, due to the high set-up costs and the need for in-house technical expertise.

Exchange Online, available as part of Office 365, provides an enterprise-level solution without the significant investment and management overheads.

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Nearly three-quarters of organisations deploying user-focused BYOD report improvements in

employee productivity, customer response times and work processes.

- Dell

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25Q How does Exchange Online differ to Exchange Server?

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Using Exchange traditionally involved buying a server, finding somewhere safe and secure to put it on your premises and employing a specialist to install and manage it.

You’d then finance powering your server, protecting your server room from fire and other risks, and provision for future upgrade costs.

Exchange Online provides all the capabilities of Exchange Server without the need to purchase, upgrade or manage your own hardware - the Exchange server is instead hosted in the cloud by Microsoft.

And routine management is significantly easier with the new Exchange admin centre.

27Q How does Exchange Online help modern businesses?

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Exchange Online gives employees the flexibility to work where they want, how they want. Integration with Outlook means that they can use the rich, familiar email application to access their business email, calendar and contacts.

They can also access them from anywhere, on any device, so it is even easier to stay in touch and share information.Outlook Web App allows seamless access to email on any computer with an internet connection - or from multiple devices like tablets and smartphones including Windows Phone, iPhone, Android and Blackberry devices.

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With 50 GB mailboxes and the ability to send messages up to 150MB in size, employees can always be productive and part of the team, wherever they are.

They can access all the same resources as they would in the office: global address lists, tasks, shared calendars to schedule meetings, book meeting rooms or other resources.

Management overheads are lower, and a monthly subscription makes budgeting easier.

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PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Essential actions for a successful email migration project

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1. Plan thoroughly

2. Know your cloud migration partner

3.Understand your existing mail environment

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Plan thoroughly1

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Failing to plan is planning to fail.“- Alan Lakein

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They say that ‘Failing to plan is planning to fail’.

Those words couldn’t be truer when it comes to migrating your email to the cloud.

Make sure your planning process contains the following key elements…

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If you don’t plan your entire migration, you’re just looking for trouble.

Work out who needs to do what and by when. Specify tasks and allocate the people responsible. Assign timings to your plan.

There should be no surprises. Otherwise you could be in the middle of the weekend you’ve allocated for the big push to cloud, only to find that a mere fraction of your important mailboxes have migrated overnight.

Work out your project delivery lifecycle

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Whilst this could be a Microsoft performance problem, more often than not the root cause of such slow migration will be an odd configuration of firewalls and proxies, security settings or server problems – all things that should have been pinpointed and fixed during the planning phase.

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One of the great things about Office 365 is that you get virtually unlimited archive storage, so migrating your archive files is probably a given.

Watch out though. Some archive vendors actually have no way of getting your emails out of their archive so –unless you're happy to keep on paying extra for archiving – you’ll have to factor into your plan the process of extracting content from the archive vendors storage systems and rebuilding archives.

Make sure you can access your email archives

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You’ve got to do this. A plan isn’t a plan if it isn’t tested.

And when you do test your migration plan, be wary of your testing environment. Is it truly representative of the actual migration environment? You don’t want to be the one stuck in the middle, saying ‘But it worked fine in the test.’

Stumbling blocks can be that a test environment might not have as much internet traffic to slow things down. And test mailboxes have no mail corruption, whereas real mailboxes may have embedded corruption within the old Exchange database.

Similarly, your test environment is unlikely to have multiple security policies and proxies applied. The solution is to create, populate and migrate a new mailbox into the current Exchange server.

Test your plan

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Employees need to be supported during these changes, so think about business requirements in terms of training and technical support. Consider how your email migration will fit in with existing processes and requirements.

For a certain period of time during your migration to the Office 365 environment, you will have a mix of on-premises mail users and Office 365 mail users. For small-medium organisations, this is when an Exchange hybrid deployment is ideal.

Miss out this part, and you’re likely to feel the pain of a lot of confused people.

Plan how you’re going to support employees

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A hybrid environment will keep staff who have not yet migrated and those who have, all on the same page.

So users who have mailboxes in your on-premises Exchange Server environment and users who have Exchange Online mailboxes can still find one another in the global address list – no matter what stage they are at in the migration process. So they can still send, receive, and reply to email regardless of which system is hosting their mailbox.

Miss out on this part and you’ll experience great disruption to your business when employees cannot communicate and collaborate effectively.

Plan how you’re going to support employees

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Plans are nothing; planning is everything

- Dwight D. Eisenhower

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Be sure to prevent – and prepare for – things going wrong.

Be confident you have contingency plans in place to keep email running should your best efforts come undone.

If you have engaged an IT partner to assist you, make sure your migration partner has the right accreditations and assurances so you can be confident your email migration is in responsible hands and won’t risk contravening your own industry compliance requirements as a result of things like mailboxes being corrupted or lost.

Security, compliance, business continuity and fall-back options

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People often create their own local email files if, for example, their business restricts their mailbox allowance.

Without any IT supervision, these files often balloon quickly, which makes them prone to corruption and at risk of data loss. They often contain business critical data and yet files are difficult to back up because they’re difficult to locate and users typically have them open.

They’re pretty much impossible to manage. Which is why it’s important to introduce PST file management into your cloud migration business contingency plans.

You need to….

Take particular care with personal storage PSTs and other local filesThese are a giant bugbear during migration

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Identify users’ PST files and analyse the data to determine what should be moved, deleted or archived.

Devise a strategy beforehand to reintegrate the valuable data back into the messaging before, during or after migration.

Think about how you are going to handle these files going forward so you avoid a repeat of this kind of scenario, which threatens compliance rules, e-discovery and business continuity. Yet you also need to address users’ needs for easy access to historical email, as well as the business need for productivity. This might mean archiving the PST file content with easy access for users, while also complying with industry regulations by automating timely deletion of data (usually after six years).

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Know your cloud migration partner2

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At Cloud Direct, we’re often asked to pick up the pieces of migrations that have been kicked off with little planning or that have been poorly advised. This is a very frustrating time for the business. They are in the middle of a scheduled migration and suddenly it all grinds to a halt so that we can try to undo what’s been done wrongly.

We sometimes even have to start the process from scratch.

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Cloud migration is still a very niche area. It is not something a business does every day, so you are unlikely to have a migration expert in your organisation.

This makes choosing a migration partner an essential element for the success of your data migration. But your choice of migration partner should be well considered. You are entrusting a critical part of your business to them. They will be responsible for the safe and clean migration of the Exchange server, and ultimately ensuring your new cloud email platform performs as the business requires. So you need to know they are worthy of that responsibility.

How do you do that?

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Suspecting and knowing are not the same

- Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

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Ask for client references

The best way of ensuring you can trust your migration partner is to ask other businesses that have gone through the migration process with them. Ask them how well the migration went and, crucially, how your potential partner responded to problems that arose during the migration?

We would love to tell you there are never any issues with email migration. Unfortunately, though, in most cases there is always something that requires that stretch more expertise and support to complete the migration successfully.

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Security is absolutely critical. ISO 27001:2013 accreditation will give you peace of mind that your partners’ people, processes and IT systems are governed by a globally recognised best practice methodology.

At Cloud Direct, we were one of the first businesses to earnISO 27001: 2013 accreditation.

Make sure your provider is ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certified

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- George Bernard Shaw

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it

has taken place“

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Understand your existing mail environment3

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It is important to fully audit your current email environment, including Active Directory. Make sure your migration partner provides you with a comprehensive report so you can see that they completely understand your setup, and exactly what they are planning to migrate and how.

To make sure you’re really prepared, ask yourself these questions:

Carry out a pre-migration audit

54Q Do you understand your email environment?

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Make sure you do.

Document EVERYTHING. Every mailbox, every distribution group, every public folder and every calendar permission. If you don’t understand what you have, you can’t know what you’ll need to re-configure once you migrate.

You’ll also want to flag any individual messages larger than 150 MB. Office 365 has increased the maximum file size it will support from 25 MB two years ago, to a much more reasonable 150 MB today.

However, if you fail to realise that someone has a message of more than 150 MB in their mailbox, you'll find your migration on hold. It’s unusual, but it does happen.

56Q Is your email environment healthy?

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Find out if your existing Exchange environment has any corrupt or unstable mailboxes. These could seriously hamper a migration. So, even if you decide against removing them, at least you can factor them into your migration process and avoid unpleasant surprises and avoidable delays.

Approaching a migration is an ideal time to consider a clean-up of the Exchange – are there large public folders that can be reduced in size? Are old employee mailboxes sitting idle that can also be removed or archived?

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Does Active Directory and Exchange contain the same information on mailboxes and user accounts? After all, moving to Office 365 requires a healthy understanding of Active Directory -especially if you are going to deploy Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) to allow for single sign-on or run a hybrid environment post-migration. If that’s the case, you’ll find the preparatory work goes beyond Exchange.

Depending on your set-up, you may also need to look at, for example, domain controllers, hub transport, and client access servers. They would need to be prepared, updated and patched before you start migration.

59Q Have you communicated about the email migration with your business?

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Email migration affects everyone so make sure you communicate thoroughly with your entire organisation.

Tell them:

• What’s going to happen and when

• What might change and when

• What actions they may have to take and when – for instance updating Outlook settings or changing their mobile email clients

• The process for reporting any issues

• The likelihood and timings of any potential disruption

You should also find out if there are any parts of the organisation where email downtime is a no-go. There are plenty of best practices and companion products we can share with you to avoid downtime during email migration and cutover.

61Q Does your organisation have the expertise, time and resources to complete a mail migration successfully?

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I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing and that is that I know nothing

- Plato, The Republic

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Too many businesses take it on without due consideration for whether their in-house resources have the knowledge, experience and time to plan and execute the migration.

It’s one thing to work with Exchange Server but cleanly migrating a live Exchange requires a depth of experience and considerable understanding.

Utilising a third party to accomplish this not only increases the chances of success, but also puts the responsibility of doing so firmly with a partner who should provide contract guarantees and SLAs.

64Q Have you looked into planning and deployment tools?

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If you ARE planning to take on migration yourself, there are tools to help you plan, test and deploy your cloud migration.

We’ve used most of the popular tools and can point you in the right direction depending on your particular circumstances.

66Q Do you have enough bandwidth onsite to avoid slow migration?

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If you don’t think your bandwidth will cope with the size of your Exchange databases, don’t expect a one-off upload. Instead, we’d advise you to stage your migration over a number of days or weeks.

Again, this might mean looking at different tools which allow for a larger number of ‘passes’ – that’s the snapshot or copy of the Exchange database which is synched to the target platform, Exchange Online.

This is more forgiving where connectivity is limited.

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COSTS

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Costs will typically revolve around the scope and complexity of services – and ultimately time –required to complete the work.

This is why the discovery stage is so important; costs should be estimated as accurately as possible at the very outset of a project.

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RECOMMENDATION

for cloud migration

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Frankly, any small or medium business that isn’t considering cloud is off their head. People need to get

over any misplaced feelings of lack of security. They need to come to terms with losing a degree of control,

when they can no longer see their disks whirring

- Peter Howlett, CFO, Pactum Asset Management

“

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To arrange a free cloud migration consultation for your business, please contact Ashley Regan, business development consultant on:

Telephone: 0800 0789 437Email: ashley.regan@clouddirect.net

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Since 2003, Cloud Direct has helped 4,000 organisations move to the cloud – quickly, easily and securely. It has built the best technologies into ready-to-go, enterprise solutions that meet the compliance, security and performance needs of regulated organisations in the UK.

Cloud Direct’s packaged cloud services come with one monthly bill and an award-winning, 24/7 customer service team. Packaged cloud drives better business continuity, productivity and agility, and guarantees the resilience of IT infrastructure and applications.

Cloud Direct is ISO 27001:2013 and ISO 20000 accredited and holds Investors in People – Gold.

Website: www.clouddirect.netTelephone: 0800 0789 437

Cloud Direct Cloud Direct@clouddirect