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Choosing an Office 365 migration service vendor to work with is a major investment. With only so much budget to spend, knowing what kind of partner makes a good fit for your organization can be stressful. To help point you in the right direction, here’s a quick list of factors you should consider before choosing a vendor.
1. Are you looking for a deep assessment of your data?
Different vendors offer services for different levels of data assessment (and some might charge more than others depending on their size). If you want a full, in-depth data analysis, it’s best to choose a migration services vendor with years of experience that can help you understand what to look for and how your data can affect your migration planning. Some vendors can also restructure and classify your data before you move to get rid of what you may not need. All of this is core to ensuring your migration data is properly structured and secure in the destination environment.
2. Do you need someone who can move you quickly?
The timeline for a migration project varies greatly depending on the amount of data, type of migration, where you’re migrating from, and a host of other factors. If you have a strict deadline that you can’t afford to miss, hiring a service with experience in performing lift-and-shift migrations might be your best option. You may need vendors with experience migrating data from multiple cloud platforms and from complex environments using tools that can move even terabytes of data in a very short period of time.
Looking for an O365 migration vendor for the first time? Check out this post: Click To Tweet3. Are you looking for a full-service vendor or a self-service tool?
There are a wide array of options to choose from when talking about Office 365 migration services.
Some vendors can handle the entire migration project for you from start to finish. They’ll plan the move with you, facilitate the move, set everything up, get all your users connected, and even put tracking and reporting capabilities in place.
Other vendors will strictly sell you migration products. If your IT team is savvy enough, you might prefer simply purchasing software and carrying out the migration yourselves.
Further still, some companies strictly focus on migrating certain functionalities. Email migration to Exchange Online is an especially popular service for organizations that aren’t ready to adopt the full Office 365 package. Is this all your business is interested in at the moment? It’s vital to know what’s available and how that offering matches your organization’s need.
4. Set your level of expectations with your vendor.
What are you expecting your vendor to bring to the table? Do you want to have them move all your data, or just sell you a solution? Do you expect training and implementation to come along with the solution? Do you want 24×7 support or even more assistance as part of the migration itself? Speak with your stakeholders and create a list of requirements for your planned data move.
In the end, choosing an Office 365 migration vendor is about going with a company you trust that checks off the greatest number of your requirements. Only after determining exactly what those requirements are should you start your migration journey. For more on Office 365 migration, take a look at four vital pre-migration planning tips.
