How a Health Organisation Maintained Clinical Continuity During Tenant Consolidation with AvePoint Fly, Cloud Backup
Success Highlights
- Migrated 2.3 TB of data from multiple Microsoft 365 tenants into a unified environment
- Onboarded 50 users in hours, reducing manual effort from three weeks to a single day
- Maintained uninterrupted access for clinical users throughout migration and onboarding
- Enabled point-in-time restore and long-term accessibility for critical health data
Location Wellington, New Zealand
Industry Health Services
Platform Microsoft 365
This health organisation in New Zealand serves nearly half a million patients. The organisation is focused on supporting stretched primary care teams and ensuring practices have the financial and clinical assistance needed to deliver essential services to their communities.
Critical Needs
- Consolidate fragmented multi-tenant environments into a unified Microsoft 365 platform
- Minimise disruption for clinical users during migration and onboarding
- Ensure compliance with health information retention and long-term data accessibility requirements
- Enable flexible migration and governance to accommodate separate environments for licensing and accounting
The Challenge
When several of its healthcare agencies merged, the organisation faced significant challenges managing fragmented, siloed data across multiple Microsoft 365 tenants, each with its own information architecture, retention settings, and legacy file stores.
This fragmentation resulted in siloed data and inconsistent controls, as policies for sharing, retention, and sensitivity labelling varied by tenant, making it difficult to apply consistent governance across agencies. Many sites still relied on on-premises shares or local folders, complicating discovery and chain of custody as the organisation prepared to consolidate. Backup schedules, restore workflows, and eDiscovery processes were duplicated for each tenant, increasing cost and operational overhead for IT teams.
Most critically, any misstep in migration risked disrupting access for frontline clinical users who rely on timely information to deliver care. These realities made a coordinated consolidation both a compliance imperative and an efficiency opportunity, requiring a secure, low-disruption path to unify tenants, support shared care pathways, and ensure reliable backup and restoration capabilities in line with strict health information retention regulations — including the legal requirement to retain health and disability records for at least 10 years under New Zealand law.
The AvePoint Solution
Prior to the migration, the organisation was already using AvePoint Cloud Backup for ongoing protection and point-in-time restoration of records and clinical documentation. This foundation gave the organisation confidence to proceed with consolidation, knowing that any migration batch could be rolled back to a known good state if needed.
To address the complexity of consolidating multiple Microsoft 365 tenants, the organisation deployed AvePoint Fly to orchestrate a secure, low-disruption migration. AvePoint Fly enabled the team to inventory sites, drives, and mailboxes, and map source-to-destination paths so each agency’s content landed in clearly named destinations. This preserved agency lineage for auditability and user clarity. The same process also enabled the merging of SharePoint sites and synchronising OneDrive content at scale.
Delta sync and cutover hygiene features captured last-minute changes and reduced the risk of message loss during migration. When legacy quirks presented challenges such as long paths, special characters, or orphaned permissions, Fly’s reporting and retry logic enabled systematic remediation. This prevented the team from getting bogged down in manual fixes.
AvePoint solutions also made automation possible, freeing the organisation from countless hours of manual copy and verification — especially for deep folder hierarchies. At one point during the official merge, 50 staff members were onboarded in just a few hours. By 5:00 p.m. on the migration day, every user had already been granted access to their mailboxes, OneDrive, and SharePoint. The organisation’s IT Operations Manager estimates that manually onboarding this number of users would have taken approximately three weeks, highlighting the massive time savings and minimal disruption for clinical users.
The solution also supported the need to keep specific environments separate for licensing and accounting, allowing content to land in partitioned destinations and Microsoft 365 groups as required. Throughout the process, AvePoint’s support team provided practical guidance on batching strategy, throttling behaviour, and troubleshooting, helping the organisation navigate a unique and complex scenario. The flexibility of the solution enabled the organisation to merge tenants, migrate users and content, and maintain access to historical backups, all while ensuring compliance and operational continuity.
The Road Ahead
With the consolidation complete, the organisation remains committed to strengthening its data governance and resilience posture. Extending the use of AvePoint’s platform to include Fly was a natural fit, as it allowed the organisation to build on the proven reliability and coverage already established with AvePoint Cloud Backup. This alignment reduced risk, shortened the learning curve, and ensured known good rollback points throughout the migration process.
Moving forward, the organisation anticipates that AvePoint Cloud Backup will continue to play a central role in ongoing protection and routine restore tests. At the same time, AvePoint Fly provides repeatable migration patterns for new clinics or future acquisitions. Consistent naming, retention, and access controls in the unified tenant will support robust, predictable experiences for clinical users.
As further consolidation of primary health services is likely on the horizon for this organisation, not to mention evolving health information regulations, these integrated solutions will enable the organisation to manage future mergers and maintain compliance with national law efficiently.
