Planning High-Volume User Migration at an Enterprise Scale

Performing migration of a large number of user accounts at an enterprise scale necessitates proper strategy planning. This mainly has got to do with the complexities involved in moving a high volume of users in terms of the number of files and root and subfolders linked to them, the intricacy of the sharing structure between the accounts, and more.

Having served enterprises worldwide, including Stryker, GSMA, REHAU, McGraw Hill, etc, we have drawn patterns on what methodologies work best. The key to migrate user accounts at an enterprise level is to align the migration strategy with the use case-based organizational goals, such as consolidating cloud operations in a single cloud ecosystem, such as the Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace suite.

Here is a framework for enterprises to plan and perform a secure and strategic migration of a high volume of users:

Mapping the User Accounts Strategically

How your IT team (involved in the migration project) plans the mapping of the user accounts lays the foundation for the strategic outcomes of the migration. Therefore, during the discovery and pre-migration assessment phase, it is critical to involve key stakeholders/decision-makers of the organization in sharing insights to strategize the mapping stage.

Based on the organizational goals, your team may need to either map the user accounts in a straightforward way to accurately replicate the sharing structure or create variations in the mapping to either make changes to the sharing structure or transfer content (files and folders) of static accounts to specific active accounts in the destination cloud.

Bifurcating Total Users into Several Migration Batches

Migrating a high volume of users, e.g., 5000+ users, in a single go, is usually not a feasible option for most enterprises as it makes:

• User account mapping complex, preferably CSV mapping which requires a lot of manual intervention.
• The overall migration is risky, since the odds of the source/destination cloud API throttling becomes higher.
• Monitoring and validation complex. The more the number of user accounts in a single migration, the more complex it becomes to monitor and validate.
• To keep these complexities from plaguing your organization’s migration progress, it is best to divide the total number of user accounts into several batches to transfer them in a phased way.

Having an Organization-wide Change Management Strategy

Migrating users accounts over to the new cloud storage/suite is one part of the corporate move. The next critical part is to ensure that the end-users are able to actually cope up with the change of cloud platforms. This is where a proper change management strategy comes into play.

Proper planning and roll out of change management efforts is eventually tied to the growth of your organization in several ways, such as:

• The users can better understand the available features and apps of the new cloud office platform and be able to effectively use them.
• The use of the cloud platform’s features at the end-user level across the organization guarantees higher operational efficiency.
• With improved operational efficiency, most teams (if not all) will be able to improve the quality of their deliverables, which eventually results in higher returns.
• Ultimately, streamlining the process for end users to adapt to the change of clouds enables your organization to not only reach the primary migration goal but also improve the ROI of the migration spend.

Plan Enterprise-Level User Migrations With our Team

Our team put a customer-first approach in providing customers, including enterprises, with the best insights, strategies, and solutions to undertake large-scale migrations of user accounts, content (files and folders), emails, chat/collaboration platforms, whiteboards, and more.

Connect with us to discuss the best way forward for your organization’s cloud office migration plans.