Proper bandwidth planning is critical to your speed and success when moving from an on-premises system to a cloud-based platform like Office 365.
When you have limited bandwidth, it slows the speed of your data migration. While there are several ways to work around bandwidth limitations in an Office 365 migration, bandwidth is constraint that must be considered from the start.
There are two main ways to migrate your system and solutions into Office 365: a cutover migration or a stage (or phase) migration. In a cutover migration, you move everything to Office 365, then cutover to the new system. The advantages of this approach are that everyone goes live with the new system at the same time, minimizing the confusion of trying to work across the old and new platforms. This only works for small organizations and those with small amounts of content.
The other option is a stage or phase migration, in which content is migrated in blocks over time. You might start with certain email users or certain SharePoint content. After transferring this data, you go live with some of the users and some of the content. You also have the option to do a full migration of users and then bring in the data incrementally. The advantage of this approach is that it takes less stress, bandwidth and time than a cutover migration.
Combining these approaches is often a good alternative: Stage the migration but use cutover in certain phases, getting the best of both options. When choosing the best approach, there are several factors to consider. Some are technical constraints, such as the size of your content: The more you have, the more difficult it would be to use a cutover migration.
Your user adoption challenges are another factor. Think about how many users you’ll need to train and their geographic locations: Are you training a group of people in one office, or in multiple languages in offices all over the world? What are your current capabilities for training and supporting new users? Considering all of these factors helps you make a good decision about the best approach for your Office 365 migration.
There are other workarounds to consider. For example, if you’re migrating an on-premises SharePoint implementation to Office 365 and bandwidth is a limiting factor, you could initially move your content to a cloud-based system that’s geographically close to where your Office 365 is hosted. Essentially, you’re replicating (or temporarily moving) your SharePoint content to Azure, which is hosted in the same data center as Office 365. This may alleviate bandwidth problems.
Another option might be to bring on additional bandwidth during the migration. If your company has a fiber-optic network, you could use a bandwidth burst for a certain length of time to ensure enough bandwidth for the migration, increasing the throughput and speed. Whatever approach you choose, planning around your bandwidth limitations from the start is a big help in keeping your Office 365 migration on track.
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