Interoperability & Coexistence During Cloud Office Migrations

Almost every cloud office migration project (small and large) revolves around maintaining operations continuity to avoid end-user impact. And as part of ensuring uninterrupted service to the end-users (employees and their teams), focusing on interoperability and coexistence pays off. It is especially crucial in large-scale enterprise-level migrations that have a timeline of more than six months.

Why Is It Critical to Focus on Interoperability and Coexistence During Migrations?

Regardless of the complexity of the migration project and the time it requires, every business planning to move its cloud offices must prioritize the continuity of the ongoing operations to avoid disruptions in users’ workflow.

At CloudFuze, we help businesses perform the entire migration process in the backend to avoid user impact. However, even when implementing our solutions, it is critical to have certain interoperability and coexistence measures in place to avoid friction in the organization-wide operations.

How to Plan for Interoperability and Coexistence?

When planning your organization’s cloud office migrations with your IT team, frame the roadmap with coexistence as a priority. Factor in the migration requirements, such as the volume of user accounts to migrate, the size of the total user data, metadata migration, etc., and address some of the vital questions, such as:

• How long must the coexistence between source and target clouds last?
• What are the specific storage drives and apps that require the coexistence of users for operations and collaboration continuity?
• What are the interoperability features of the apps required for user coexistence?
• Will the interoperating apps interfere with the migration process?

How to Implement Interoperability and Coexistence During Migration?

Out of all the apps within the source and destination clouds, the ones that directly enable communication and collaboration between the users (and their teams) are an interoperability priority. Here are some of the action items your IT team can take insights from:

Interoperability between chat communication apps:

Integrate the chat app (that your company is using with the source cloud) with the target cloud’s chat platform to maintain continuity in user communication. This step is critical for organizations that have a remote or hybrid workforce. For example, if your organization is currently using Slack with a cloud storage drive and is planning to move to Microsoft 365, your IT team can focus on integrating Slack to Teams temporarily.

Coexistence with email forwarding:

Email is another critical area that requires coexistence to maintain operations flow between internal users and with external collaborators. One straightforward approach is to set up email forwarding from the source cloud’s email platform to the target cloud’s email system. For example, when migrating from Google Workspace to Microsoft 365, your IT team can set up email forwarding from Gmail to Outlook.