How long does it take to migrate to Office 365?

Are you growing your organisation? You realise that you need a bigger, better and more capable communication platform for your legacy email communication system, you do your research, and now you are convinced that Office 365 is your best option. What comes next? Right, planning to migrate your existing mailboxes to Office 365. But what are the first questions that pop up in your mind?

•       How much will it cost?

•       How long does Office 365 migration take?

•       Where do we start?

O365 migration process

Office 365 comprehensive suite of several products and applications bundled together and hosted on the cloud is a totally new experience. What you get is what you pay for. With that said, every organisation differs in its scale of operations and may not need all the applications on offer. Consequently, there will be significant variations in the magnitude and scale of migration. We will only consider the migration of mailboxes while addressing questions like the ones above for the sake of simplicity. 

Timing

Migrating mailboxes to O365 can range from a few minutes to several months. While the answer to such a query certainly cannot be whetted on stone, based on our experience and the historical data from Microsoft, it could take up to two weeks to migrate a batch of not more than 1000 mailboxes. The size of the mailboxes is as important as the number of mailboxes. In other words, a single mailbox of over 10 GB will take as much time to migrate as hundreds of mailboxes with less than 1 GB of data under the same circumstances.

 Migration is a complex process involving several variables with some having a greater impact on performance than others. It’s essential to take into consideration all the factors likely to have the greatest impact on the speed and degree of success, while planning the migration process depending on the used method. The source from which you are migrating to Office 365 tends to be one of the major factors impacting the migration process. Different email service providers store their files differently. The way data is stored, processed, and accessed by the provider are the factors that determine how easy or difficult it is to migrate data to Office 365.

Resource 

The process length depends on the migration speed of mailboxes. The speed with which migrations take place depends on the resources available for processing. Factors such as processing power of the CPU, competing for backend tasks such as backups, physical limitations on data transfer due to policies, all have a significant impact on the speed of migration.

Infrastructure

The physical infrastructure at various touch points affects the data transfer speed. The size of the server at the source and destination mailboxes along with the geographical distance separating the two determine the speed of data transmission. The process will be hampered if the servers are overloaded, either on-premises or with the hosting providers.

Office 365 migration services require a fast and reliable internet connection to carry out data-intensive tasks. Hardware and software components such as modems and drivers along with the bandwidth provided by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) at various stages across the chain will impact transmission speeds. Firewall settings can play a role in throttling data transfer at the client premises. Additionally, internet speeds also vary depending on the type of connection, number of active users and devices connected to the network and other factors.

Are you ready for Office 365 migration?

Now that you know the factors that affect the time taken to migrate to Office 365, you probably realised the need of preparing for the process. The complexity of planning increases with the scope of migration. The cost of migrating also escalates proportionally. Apart from these challenges, it is important to prepare for exigencies and compatibility issues during the process of Office 365 migration. We determine all the factors with meticulous care and provide you a detailed roadmap for migration. 

Post-migration

Have a team involved solving any issues you might face is another step that you need to include, and it depends on you to have the best practices in your new environment. Always have experts like us to ensure you’ll be successful in your transition to O365 and any other transition. We’re here to help.