MIGRATING TO OFFICE 365: A BRIEF GUIDE FOR EXCHANGE ADMINISTRATION

Transcription

1 MIGRATING TO OFFICE 365: A BRIEF GUIDE FOR EXCHANGE ADMINISTRATION C2C Systems

2 Abstract Microsoft recently claimed that upwards of 40% of their overall Office sales are coming from Office 365. Office 365 provides a number of benefits, and organizations are well-advised to research Office 365 options and determine whether they can leverage its features and benefits. Table of Contents Background 3 Speed bumps to Office 365 Migrations 3 1. Migration Bandwidth 3 2. PST Ingestion 4 3. Compliance 5 4. Inbox Bloat 5 5. Existing Legal Situations 6 The Hybrid Cloud Solution 7 Final Thoughts from C2C Systems 8 Managers of Exchange environments are advised that migrations are like any other IT project, and they need a plan that addresses several key issues which, if neglected, will hamper this project and may have an unsuitable outcome. C2C Systems

3 Background By Microsoft s own admission, Office 365 is a runaway success, and not surprising. Office 365 brings all the benefits of a hosted environment to enterprises large and small, as well as collaboration and communication tools like Lync and Yammer. For an IT Professional, however, the devil is in the details, since this is a migration, not a simple installation. How can you make your migration to Office 365 efficient? Are there strategies to address any Office 365 shortcomings? How can you ensure your migration is smooth, onbudget, and within your timeframes? We hope this quick guide helps. Speed bumps to Office 365 Migrations The challenge isn t using Office 365 (your users will see few differences, aside from performance this is after all a web-based application), the challenge is getting there. The key stumbling blocks or speed bumps you need to consider are migration bandwidth, PST ingestion, compliance, inbox bloat, and existing legal situations. Each will be looked at in detail below. 1. Migration Bandwidth The impact of bandwidth is often underestimated, since IT isn t in the habit of moving massive amounts of information across an internet connection into the cloud. Your entire Exchange information store will be migrated to the cloud, and companies with users who have large mailboxes or large volumes of PSTs, can face a serious bandwidth issue when trying to migrate these large mailboxes. For example, a 25GB mailbox, admittedly massive, will take 5.6 hours to migrate using a DSL connection if this is the only activity going on (be aware there are throttles within Office 365 to protect the overall health of the system and which therefore keep a task like migration from consuming all available bandwidth). Few mailboxes are this large, but 500MB to 1GB mailboxes are common, and each could take an hour or more to migrate. Also remember, you ll need to maintain both environments until your migration is complete. Avoiding Bandwidth Issues In addition to scheduling migration during off-peak hours to have the greatest available throughput, ensure that other company departments don t have large transmissions scheduled or planned during these migrations (i.e., check your output logs, it s an easy thing to miss). Most important, limit what you are migrating! The smaller the inbox, the faster it can be migrated. One successful strategy is to archive existing first. C2C Systems

4 This may sound counter-intuitive but in reality, only the last days of most users inboxes are regularly accessed, yet users typically allow their inboxes to fill to capacity with rarelyaccessed information. An archiving solution can retain stubs from archived s so the users inboxes in Office 365 still provide seamless access. Do a calculation based on your available bandwidth and determine where you need a cut-off, install your archive solution first, and then migrate. This can turn a multi-month project into a multi-week one. 2. PST Ingestion With Office 365, the notion of personally-stored s i.e., the PST file is eliminated. This is a great strategy going forward, but for an Office 365 migration, either administration re-ingests users PST files back into Exchange, or has each end user do this themselves using Outlook s Import and Export wizard. Neither solution is exactly ideal. Suddenly that 25GB mailbox isn t so generous, as you will find some users whose PST files likely exceed this allowance. Of more significance, you will need additional temporary storage for mailboxes post-ingestion prior to migrating them to Office 365. Once ingested, PST files need to be removed (otherwise you ll face support calls since users will forget that they can no longer access their PST files). Finally, you will find orphaned PST files on your servers and desktops i.e., PST files for which there is no longer a valid or identified user or owner. You will need a strategy for these files since they will be inaccessible once you migrate to Office 365. Managing PST Ingestion Microsoft provides a free PST migration tool, called PST Capture, but this doesn t cover the work involved in finding, organizing, removing and finally deleting PSTs. Therefore a third-party tool that provides a wider range of features is your best choice, and this also means that you won t have to have to go back and clean-up after the migration is complete. Prior to beginning your Office 365 migration, you should inventory all the potential PST files, including locating any orphans. Along with your inventory, make sure you understand the size of these files so you can allocate sufficient storage, because they will expand the size of user mailboxes considerably prior to migration. Finally, you may wish to stage PST ingestion, i.e. identify your largest PST users and migrate them only as space becomes available. If you ve deployed a third party tool, you can likely institute the same archiving policies as with the first speed bump, which will greatly reduce the amount of data being re-ingested. Again, limit what you are migrating! C2C Systems

5 3. Compliance Office 365 includes user or admin-defined policy-based archiving (into a secondary archive mailbox) and approaches compliance from an in-place standpoint. The typical deployment of compliance has been ensuring that mail is captured before it reaches the mailbox and thus ensures compliance (generally utilizing Journal Archiving). While regulated companies absolutely need to demonstrate compliance, most companies need to comply with employment regulations regarding equality, health and safety so in essence they re regulated as well. Ensuring Compliance Best practice is to have a separate compliance archive and ediscovery process, ideally behind your firewall. Any public entity knows that failures to respond to document requests in any way have negative consequences. Compliance is only addressed in Office 365 in-place. A third-party archiving solution can utilize hardware you already own to establish a compliance archive which can sit behind your firewall and ensure you can respond to information requests quickly and easily, avoiding penalties and other damages. 4. Inbox Bloat In choosing Office 365, one attractive feature is large mailboxes. For most organizations it means the virtual elimination of mailbox quotas, which users will appreciate. This also means users need not turn to archives to search for old s all can be retained within their inbox. This notion of a virtual inbox comes with a heavy price. In the first case, Microsoft removed SIS or Single Instance Storage with Exchange 2013, so multiple copies of s will be retained in users inboxes. This is good for users, but bad for IT, since it automatically bloats the size of users mailboxes. Re-ingesting PST files, which are often unused, will artificially inflate the size of user inboxes during migration. Going forward, large inboxes pose several problems. One is searchability: it s one thing to have unfettered access to 25GB worth of storage; it s another thing to actually try to search it. Although Microsoft have improved search performance in Office 365, user-run searches can still be slow, they can starve your network when users retrieve large amounts of information (something that s possible with Office 365), and they will generate support calls. Users will equate a long response time with a frozen or unresponsive system and naturally call the IT help desk. C2C Systems

6 A second problem is long-term storage. Businesses are only a year or so away from an average message size of 100KB (without attachments), and typical workers receive hundreds of messages every day. While there s little apparent cost downside to maintaining 25GB mailboxes, the data is no longer under control of the enterprise, it s being hosted. Backup SLAs from Microsoft aren t nearly as generous as companies expect (i.e., they do not compensate you for lost data), and year-on-year storage costs will increase. Managing Inbox Bloat The easiest way to manage hosted inboxes is to ensure that only what has business value is migrated and retained. This can be a forced limitation at the time of migration (i.e., no PST migrations, and deletion of s past a given age). You can also put the burden on the end user (i.e., self-migration, and self policing), but realize the results are rarely optimal. Going forward, managing user inboxes is the same process of determining business value and eliminating the rest. If ignored, users will quickly fill the largest inboxes with ROT (redundant, obsolete, or trivial ). Third party archiving is an easier to avoid this situation: not only can it limit what s migrated in the first place, it will proactively archive users inbox contents, thus avoiding the bloating of inboxes, both upon migration and into the future. Archives are rarely accessed, so they can be stored outside your hosted Exchange environment and still function seamlessly for end users, without incurring inbox bloat of keeping such information live. 5. Existing Legal Situations Many companies face litigation, and many are in the middle of legal matters while IT is trying to perform projects like Office 365 migrations. This can be a tricky situation: if a mailbox which is on legal hold is migrated (i.e., moved) without a documented and audited process and is not similarly on hold after it s been migrated, you can jeopardize your company s legal position and possibly run afoul of state and Federal laws. User s or inboxes on legal hold must remain secured for the duration of the matter. In addition, a company may be preparing for litigation, and need the ability to perform ediscovery across a range of users. If a migration is planned to Office 365, a legal matter can stop it dead without advanced planning. Microsoft s built-in ediscovery capabilities can be a boon to legal departments post-migration, but are useless for anything which is imminent; a bit of homework is required before any migration can be planned. C2C Systems

7 Accommodating Existing Legal Situations This will require preparation on the part of IT, since the answers may not be readily known. First, any inboxes or user folders on legal hold need to be identified prior to the migration, and a plan needs to be put in-place to either keep these on-premise until the matter is concluded or carefully document how they have been preserved during the migration. If you decide to keep on-hold data on-premise, this shouldn t be an issue. After all, you already own the on-premise equipment and installation, and it will only be a small number of inboxes or folders which must be maintained in the old system. Second, Legal must be consulted. There is a situation called reasonable expectation of litigation and it simply means that the company is in a situation where a lawsuit is imminent, expected, or the company itself expects to file a lawsuit. Where this situation exists, any potential users or folders (called custodians within Legal jargon) must be put on legal hold until either the threat is over or the litigation is concluded. If the company is in the middle of litigation, as noted above, the Legal Department will not be able to utilize Office 365 s built-in ediscovery for that matter (they can use it going forward for new cases, however). If a third-party archiving solution is chosen to solve any of the previous issues, many offer ediscovery capabilities which are equal to or superior to Office 365 s built-in ediscovery. Regarding the subject of legal considerations, something companies need to understand is the cost of downloading hosted data. Hosting providers are very generous with upload costs hence large mailboxes at little to no cost but charge a premium when you go to download that data. ediscovery collections can be quite large, and at $12/GB (today s rates from typical public cloud providers) a multi-tb collection can get expensive. For that reason alone, on-premise or private cloud archiving is attractive. The Hybrid Cloud Solution For a number of reasons from compliance requirements to lengthy migrations to pre-existing hardware ownership many customers who migrate to Office 365 will retain some component of their infrastructure behind their firewall or within their control. During the migration, of course, these customers will continue to maintain their existing onpremise servers, so will already be using a hybrid environment. Many will retain some aspect of that on-premise solution, including some mailboxes, well beyond the deployment of Office 365. Customers who retain some aspect of their on-premise solution yet migrate a significant portion to Office 365 are part of a growing trend the hybrid solution. A hybrid solution balances some portion of on-premise servers for compliance, archiving, etc., with the bulk of companies live mailboxes and archival storage in the cloud. C2C Systems

8 Companies deploying hybrid solutions have another choice they can make, which is to move part or all of their remaining on-premise solutions to their own cloud (either a private cloud or a public one). In this way, they continue to control critical aspects like compliance, archive retrieval, and ediscovery, while they leverage Office 365 for hosted , Moving remaining on-premise services and archives to the cloud is frankly something best done after your migration has been successfully completed. Final Thoughts from C2C Systems Going from an on-premise, self-managed Exchange environment to a hosted, online, vendormanaged one is a big step, but Office 365 provides a range of benefits which are attractive to many companies. The IT organization is front and center to ensuring a thoughtful, efficient, and satisfactory migration. You will also be held accountable if problems arise in the future which should have been addressed before the migration occurred. In the migration situations we see as well as the ones in which we have participated the five speed bumps we've outlined have all been encountered to some degree by our customers and prospects. Every company s environment differs, and for some the speed bumps have been something they could navigate without third party help. In other instances, we have seen deployments stretch out interminably as each speed bump precedes the next. Your best advice is to plan out a migration just like any other IT project and be mindful of these speed bumps. They ve stumped many companies and without some forethought they can impede the most diligent plans. If you are contemplating a third party archiving solution to address these speed bumps, you may wish to read our companion white paper, Cost Justification for Archiving, which we are happy to provide upon request. C2C Systems

9 About C2C C2C is a leading provider of and information management software for Microsoft Exchange. Our products provide centralized control over archiving, retention, disposition, compliance, preservation and discovery of corporate data. From our initial compression product twenty years ago, to our flagship ArchiveOne Enterprise platform, C2C products are recognized for ease-of-use and flexibility. C2C continues to meet the evolving needs of organizations and our customers benefit from improved server performance, reduced storage costs, improved search and discovery processes, and lower corporate risk because they manage and data before it overwhelms them. ArchiveOne archiving solutions are chosen by enterprises who want a seamless user experience and tight integration with all versions of Microsoft Exchange. Configuration options include on-premise and Hybrid-cloud, offering organizations the need for flexible infrastructure design. Organizations looking to control PST files choose PST Enterprise to locate, migrate, and ultimately expire data held in PST s. This allows them to consolidate resources, migrate to new architectures, and eliminate the risk inherent in old, unknown data. A Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, C2C was established in 1992, and is a privately-held company with offices in Westborough, MA and Reading, UK. C2C Systems