Cloud Migration Managed Services vs Internal IT Efforts

Businesses usually find it challenging to decide whether to opt for a managed service (white glove service) or use in-house IT resources to migrate users and data from one cloud to another. If your company is on the same page, this post can be a great starting point to understand the best approach.

Below, we have compared managed migration services with internal IT efforts to help businesses make informed decisions in planning their upcoming migration project.

1. Migration Roadmap, Timeline, and SOW Planning

Managed migration service: Using a proper cloud migration management service helps companies remove uncertainties in planning the roadmap in line with a proper migration timeline. The migration provider’s experience in working with global companies (enterprises and SMBs combined) for their migration projects outweighs the first-time migration IT preparation your company may plan.

Internal IT efforts: The involvement of the IT, management, and operations team moves the needle in identifying opportunities (e.g., better data governance and user collaboration) and strategizing the migration goals as part of planning the scope of work (SOW).

2. User Batches and Destination Cloud Preparation

Managed migration service: Finalizing and mapping user accounts accurately require a high level of granularity and, therefore, can be complicated. And segregating the mapped user accounts into several batches adds more to the complexity.

However, companies can free their IT team from these complexities by bringing in professional assistance from the managed migration team.

At CloudFuze, our managed cloud migration service covers the ins and outs of user account mapping and destination cloud preparations, such as pre-provisioning user accounts when migrating to Microsoft 365.

Internal IT efforts: While internal teams, including IT, can research online and take measures to prepare the destination cloud, they can face a lot of challenges in mapping user accounts and validating the mapping. Since the process of populating data from CSV mapping to the migration tool can be specific to the migration vendor, the IT team may not be able to do much to internalize this project phase.

3. Migration Tool/Platform Configuration

Managed migration service: Since migration vendors know the ins and outs of their tool, their cloud migration managers and teams are best suited to configure the tool for the migration project. With CloudFuze as the migration partner, your organization benefits from complete support in configuring our cloud storage migration tool, X-Change.

From adding the clouds (with admin credentials) to deploying the tool in an on-prem environment, our managed migration team covers all aspects of tool configuration.

Internal IT efforts: There is not much scope for IT teams to have an integral involvement in the tool configuration process (except whitelisting), as all business customers must follow the migration vendor’s protocols. For example, if your IT team plans to deploy the tool in the company’s private on-prem environment, it is critical to work with the migration partner’s technical team to install the desktop client.

4. Migration Validation

Managed migration service: Businesses with multi-faceted cloud storage migration goals must have an extensive validation process in place to analyze the results and gain clarity on whether the overall migration project is a complete success.

And a proper cloud migration project management service plays a mission-critical role in enabling companies to validate the migrated workloads extensively through migration reports and tool/server performance analysis.

Internal IT efforts: IT teams of companies can have their decision-making part in defining a robust set of KPIs (key performance indicators) and using them to validate the migrated user accounts and data. However, the IT teams can face challenges in understanding conflicts and resolutions, requiring the migration partner’s involvement.

5. Destination Cloud Onboarding

Managed migration service: Since ensuring a seamless end-user transition to the destination cloud is one of the crucial migration goals for most companies, it is a must to follow a structured destination cloud onboarding approach.

With a proper managed cloud migration service, it becomes hassle-free to onboard a high volume of users to the destination cloud while ensuring proper hands-on training. The complete handholding in this phase of the migration project enables businesses and their IT teams to focus on other aspects of change management to make the transition seamless.

Internal IT efforts: IT teams can work along with the migration vendor’s team to add more to the end-user onboarding enablement by collating official onboarding/adoption resources. For example, if your company is migrating to Google Workspace, your IT team can collate Google Workspace onboarding resources and share them on a company-wide level.