You Gotta Have Bandwidth

And lots of it. While BPOS and Office 365 are great products one of the challenges is migrating the email data to the cloud. While migrating data to another on-premise server your connectivity will typically be 100 mbps or 1 gbps. Even with a 100 MB pipe you can move a lot of data in a few hours. But a small company will typically have a 512 kbps to 1.5 mbps Internet connection to move data to the cloud. So how do you move a 75 GB email store to the cloud over a 512 connection? (I've had to do it.)

With BPOS you really had to be careful because there was only 1 way to migrate, push the button, let it copy, and setup the clients. The migration could be staged, doing a few users at a time,  but that will drag out the migration and there is a lot of functionality lost during the transition.

Thankfully Microsoft learned from this and greatly improved this migration process. They now have 3 distinct migration techniques: Cutover, Staged, and Hybrid. Let me briefly explain each one.

Cutover - the whole company moves at once. flip the switch, migrate the data, setup the user.

Staged - move a few users at a time, but the Microsoft system and the on-premise system don't integrate at all, therefore losing functionality during the transition.

Hybrid - this completely integrates the on-premise and Microsoft systems which allows you to migrate at your leisure and causes no disruption to the users.

The Hybrid solution should be used for all migrations except for the reasons below

- extremely small companies (less than 20 users and under 10 GB of data)

- companies that want to be completely serverless

- companies that don't have and will not buy the hardware for the migration

I cannot stress enough the importance of a migration that is low impact to the users. The cutover and staged migrations tend to be more rushed and are more of an "all or nothing" when migrating the users. Once the user is migrated they either can't be moved back (cutover) or is very difficult (staged).

What makes the Hybrid solution so fantastic is the seamlessness to the users and the ability to migrate the users at a "casual" pace. It also allows the company to use whatever bandwidth is available. It also allows more flexibility during the transition. User disruption is time and money lost.

Migrations need to happen. When they do the user should not need to worry about if it will work for them or if they will lose any data. A migration should be a non-event to the user. Anything less than that and money is lost.