You are likely to experience IT infrastructure strain if you add remote users to your organization for the first time.
While “migrating to the Cloud” has become a popular trend that promises to achieve cost savings, improved uptime, and extra features.
Will it be beneficial to me?
It completely depends upon your needs, the infrastructure you have, and the ability of your current team to maintain the onsite Microsoft Exchange server.
Here’s how to estimate your structure to see if a Microsoft 365 migration is best for you.
A very important aspect to consider is a practical evaluation of your organization’s ability to manage the on-prem Exchange servers.
Start with the question: how long does it take to examine and execute the patches on the servers when Microsoft releases decisive patches for an Exchange Server, such as the one patched which released in early September?
Any organization thinking about a migration to Microsoft 365 needs to work closely with its IT team and/or IT vendor to estimate the cost spent on software maintenance, as well as the hardware for the servers.
If these things are not currently measured, implement a tracking system for a month or two, then check.
Need of proper Infrastructure and Location.
Another important aspect to analyze is the current state of your organization and its present IT infrastructure.
Before migration you need to ask these questions:
- Where does your workforce work?
- Does the current IT infrastructure provide sufficient bandwidth?
Some organization has only one office, and many times Exchange server inside that office appropriately meets their ongoing needs.
However, some organizations have various offices, and they would be benefited from multiple exchange servers or simply dropping dedicated lines between offices that can be used for a central exchange server.
If a large portion of your LAN-to-Internet traffic is currently occupied by VPN users, then allowing them to interact directly with the cloud will decrease infrastructure strain.
User Practices
Some users just don’t like the change when Microsoft 365 adds new features and changes its display. Many others won’t even notice.
After Exchange 2010 to Office 365 migration, users may see a change while accessing their emails and shared files. Will your employees swiftly welcome the changes, or will they be difficult to train?
Feature Needs
Microsoft regularly adds different features to Microsoft 365 and also offers various collaboration apps.
However, if users surely need MS Office and Outlook, there is no benefit to those users to move from a feature standpoint.
If your users are excited to use new apps, then there are many cool features to take full advantage of the cloud. For example, Microsoft has now added Whiteboard to Teams so that users can apply sticky notes, add text, and even move objects around a shared workspace even during a live call.
Sunk vs Future vs Switching Costs.
Naturally, cost plays a large role.
Any evaluation will need a CIO to compare the sunk and future costs of retaining on-prem servers against the switching and ongoing subscription costs of Microsoft 365.
Sunk costs include all the money spent to date in acquiring and setting up the present servers. For organizations that have already made important investments, it will be very tough to ignore those.
The future costs will include labor, hardware replacement costs, software renewal costs, etc. These costs may not be immediately visible and take some time to list and estimate.
Migration of a large environment can be expensive and complex and may need expert direction to estimate accurately.
Making the Right Decision
If you are happy, stable, and all your costs are under check, perhaps there is no clear option than Microsoft 365 to consider.
So, before we conclude it is very much important to choose the right provider who has the expertise in Office 365 migration. After considering all the different factors, O365CloudExperts, will be the perfect choice for you. Over the past 15 years, they have successfully completed various migrations like Exchange to Office 365 migration, SharePoint Online tenant to tenant migration, and many more. They also have expertise in complex tasks such as Windows Virtual Desktop deployment who can design a fail-proof migration plan with zero downtime or data loss.