With the increasing popularity of cloud computing, a lot of businesses are carrying out Office 365 migration for its wide variety of services which includes cloud-based communication, productivity and collaboration features.

Office 365 migration can be tough to do when you are trying to switch between old and the new platform. You employees may take some time to learn the new email system and also experience downtime. You also need to make sure that your data is safe during the move. Office 365 migrations can take from a few weeks to several months.

In this article, we will talk about the common Office 365 migration paths that you can take for your Office 365 tenant migration.

The Common Office 365 Migration Paths are:

• Cutover migration
• Staged migration
• Hybrid configuration
• IMAP migration

Before you start the migration project, you will need to know what your business requirement is. Factors such as the migration completion date, on-premise email resources, back-out options for the migration will be very important for your move to Office 365. Every migration is different and each has their own features. This is important to know to suit your business requirements.

Cutover Migration

Considered the easiest of all the migration types and the choice of numerous small-business owners. This migration is used to transfer everything in one go. All your mailboxes, users, groups and your contacts are moved. This is the simplest method for organizations to move their entire email infrastructure and manage their user accounts there.

You cannot select specific objects to migrate and once all your data is migrated, all users will have an Office 365 account. If you have less than 2000 mailboxes and using Exchange 2003, 2007, 2010 or 2013 then this method will be the best for your organization.

Hybrid Migration

Compared to cutover migration, this kind of migration is a lot more complicated. This kind of migration allows you to integrate your on-premise Exchange server along with Office 365 and existing directory services. A hybrid migration helps you move mailboxes in and out of Exchange Online and lets you choose which mailboxes to move and which mailboxes to migrate to Office 365.

It can be a challenge to use hybrid migration as there are a lot of platforms involved in the move to Office 365. A hybrid migration can handle more than 2000 mailboxes and is useful for medium-sized businesses.

Staged Migration

A great choice for medium and large organizations. If you don’t want to move all your mailboxes at one then staged migration is a great choice for you. A staged migration helps you move your mailboxes to Office 365 in batches over the span of a few hours or days.

It is recommended for medium to large organizations where the volume of data to be migrated is too high and has to be migrated overtime. It is the perfect solution for organizations who operate 24×7 and cannot afford to lose any time over the migration. The goal of a staged migration is to fully migrate to the cloud, unlike the hybrid migration. A staged migration only supports Exchange 2003 and 2007. If you are running Exchange 2010 or higher, then a hybrid migration is more suitable for you.

IMAP Migration

An IMAP migration or Internet Message Access Protocol Migration allows you to migrate from Gmail or other email systems that support IMAP migration. An IMAP migration won’t migrate anything other than your email. All your other data such as calendar items, tasks, and contacts will stay in your old mailbox and will have to be migrated by the user themselves.

Before the migration, you’ll have to create a mailbox for each of the users. This type of migration has a limit of about 50,000 mailboxes and around 5,000,000 items. Once your migration is done, all the email that will be sent to the old mailbox will not be sent to the new one.

Wrapping Up

Migrating to Office 365 can provide a lot of additional features and capabilities to organizations who want to move to the cloud.

This is a great option to save costs too. To get your migration done and know which migration is the best for you, you will need great Office 365 migration services that can help you make the move. The email migration service that you go for will help you with a seamless migration service without any disruption in your work.