Planning is an essential part of any significant undertaking. If you’re moving your company’s data, then it should go without saying: you need a plan. Here, we talk about why planning is essential and how a plan can make your whole migration process easier. Below are the reasons you need a plan when migrating your company data:
1. Knowing What to Do When Things Go Wrong
If something terrible happens when migrating to office 365, you’ll need to be able to address it. For example, if a system goes down in the middle of your migration, it could delay or even halt it. Planning lets you know what steps to take in such a scenario.
2. Uncertainties for the Human Element
It’s easy to forget about the people involved in your Office 365 migration plan. For example, part of your team might be incredibly busy at certain times of the year and may not have time to help with data migration. By planning for this, you can ensure the migration doesn’t get sidelined for one reason or another.
3. Potential Miscommunications
Miscommunications happen in any situation, whether a family gathering or even two strangers discussing how to get along better. You need the plan to ensure that you’re on the same page with your team members if you meet resistance or confusion.
4. Readiness for Growth Spurts
As your company expands, it will likely have periods of growth and expansion and periods of slower growth or even contraction. By ensuring you have a plan in place, you’ll be able to handle whatever comes your way.
5. Assess the Financial Impact of Your Migration
As with most significant undertakings, when you’re moving your company’s data, it can be costly. For example, if it takes more than one week to complete the migration process, you’re looking at a lot of overtime at excessively high rates. Make sure you know your timeline before starting a migration and how much it will cost.
6. Preparing for Downtime During the Migration
If your company has data on systems that are being protected by other systems, then you need to be aware that some data may not be migrated due to system downtime. For example, if a particular application is protecting your server’s data, it could cause the entire system to go down. By planning, you can prevent this and ensure that your company’s data isn’t lost.
7. Preparing for a Change in Leadership
If you have a large team within your company, it won’t be hard to remove the old hierarchy and create new roles. But, when you do this, you’ll have to plan for who will move into those different roles. For example, if someone were previously in charge of the marketing department, they would now lead it. That means the old and new leaders need to know what to expect while preparing their departments for significant changes.
8. Readiness for the Possibility of Redundancy
Data redundancy is a significant concern, especially if your company has multiple data centers. If one data center goes down, you can have the other pick up the slack, but that won’t help if there’s no redundant information. Make sure you plan to ensure that all of your data is stored in as many locations as possible and stored redundantly.
9. Time Constraint Planning
If your company’s data is stored on multiple servers and systems, then migrating it all at once could take many months or even years. That’s why you’ll want to plan to migrate in multiple steps. For example, you could break the migration into one-month chunks even if it takes six months.
10. Bandwidth Challenges
If your company works with a large amount of data, you might find insufficient bandwidth to transfer everything at once. To get around this, you can divide the migration into multiple parts. For example, suppose you’re migrating 25 terabytes and only have 10 gigabytes of bandwidth available daily. In that case, you’ll want to split up the migration into 10-terabyte chunks rather than just one 25-terabyte.
Conclusion
Planning can take a few hours, but it could save you thousands of dollars. The planning could also help prevent unnecessary stress and heartache as well. Your data migration will probably go more smoothly if you follow these tips and ensure everyone is on board with the process.
