Moving to the Digital Workspace With Microsoft 365: A Guide for Leaders
MICROSOFT 365 MIGRATION GUIDE FOR MID-SIZE ENTERPRISES
If your organization is still working with local versions of Microsoft Office and a hodgepodge of security apps, now is the time to consider a move to Microsoft 365.
?Why move?
In short, moving your workspace technology and app security to the cloud helps to enable a wide range of benefits to satisfy the entire C-Suite:
For the entire C-Suite, Steering Committees and Board:
For the CIO, CTO and CISO:
For the CFO:
?For the CMO, CCO, Product and Sales Leaders:
Work is Changing. Are You Prepared?
Overcome these challenges to be ready.
The definition of work has changed considerably in the last few years. Today’s workforce is more mobile, social, and global, and the devices and digital tools people use to get their work done reflect those changes. Organizations are finding tremendous value in bringing new work styles and people connection points together using unified digital workspace solutions.
?Companies that stay on-premise are missing out on capabilities to enable remote hybrid work and spur innovation through improved teamwork and communication. Leading organizations are re-envisioning what it means to work and gaining the benefits of cloud-enabled solutions.
?So, let’s examine why your organization should be looking to move to Microsoft 365, if you haven’t already. We also include a step-by-step checklist for a successful migration.
We’ll start with a brief overview of Microsoft 365 and the licensing options.
What Does Microsoft 365 Offer?
Microsoft 365 is a bundled suite of cloud-based apps for productivity (Outlook, Word, PowerPoint, Teams, Sharepoint and more) and security services with different packages designed for small, medium and large businesses. Microsoft 365 for enterprise is designed for large organizations, but it can also be used for medium-sized and small businesses that need the most advanced security and productivity capabilities.
?Microsoft 365 includes Office 365, Windows 10 Enterprise, Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) and machine learning. Like Office 365, there are multiple subscriptions to choose from depending on your needs.
For the purposes of this article, we focus on Microsoft 365 for enterprise.
?Microsoft 365 for enterprise consists of:
?Microsoft 365 offers?3 license packages. Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 are the most popular of these options. E3 provides MS Office suite, Cloud Storage and Data Loss Prevention (DPL). E5 includes all of these plus voice and analytics tools and advanced security capabilities.
Microsoft provides a?side-by-side comparison of Microsoft 365 for Enterprise?and a handy?comparison of Office 365 and Microsoft 365
If you are wondering why the name changed from Office 365 to Microsoft 365, Microsoft changed its naming convention in 2020. To ensure their customers have access to a unified productivity platform of a single name, Office 365 became Microsoft 365.
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What is the Right Microsoft 365 Plan for Enterprises Who Want Advanced Security?
?Compared to Office 365 Enterprise,?Microsoft 365 Enterprise?is a great for organizations that want a single, secure platform to share and collaborate. Additionally, Microsoft 365 offers a lot more in terms of advanced security to defend more complex organizational environments across a wide range of endpoints and attack vectors (such as email, and identity).
Microsoft 365 Enterprise includes a significant upgrade to Office 365 Enterprise with advanced security features such as?Microsoft Defender?for threat protection, which includes Detection and investigation of advanced threats, compromised identities, and malicious actions across your on-premises and cloud environments – all controlled from a unified security center.
Microsoft 365 Enterprise also stand out with advanced security management features including Microsoft Secure Score and Microsoft Security and Compliance Center, which provide improved visibility across cloud apps and services to control data flow and respond to and response more quickly to cyber threats.
The Top Reasons Organizations Migrate to Microsoft 365
There are a lot of good reasons to upgrade medium to large organizations to Microsoft 365, covering many functions within the enterprise and across your entire supply chain.
Enhance Work Mobility and Flexibility
Creating a flexible and digital work environment for your employees is vital to business growth. According to the Work Trend Index Survey,?73% of workers want flexibility in their work. This strongly indicates that organizations need to re-design their work environments to accommodate better flexibility.
Platforms like Microsoft 365 help you achieve this flexibility because they can be used across devices to power hybrid work and bolster employee connectivity and collaboration. Apps like Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive make organizing, storing, and managing data possible from a desktop or mobile device. With Power Apps and Power Automate, you also can quickly build your own custom apps and workflow automations that integrate with the Microsoft 365 suite.
Retire Costly, Hard to Maintain Legacy IT Infrastructure
Reduction in maintenance and related costs are key reasons why IT leaders move infrastructure and data to the cloud. Many companies that move to the cloud will be able to dramatically reduce their IT operations and can streamline how IT services are delivered.
?Cloud solutions like Microsoft 365 frees up the demand for increased office space and allows businesses to focus resources on business expansion and growth. Simplified deployment, provisioning and management eliminates the expenditure necessary for maintaining on-premises legacy infrastructure.
Improved Security and Resilience
It should be no surprise that cyber-attacks are on the rise. Attackers have more advanced methods to target the weakest link across your core infrastructure, identities, network, data, devices, and apps to gain access to corporate resources and valuable data.
Rapid adoption of cloud has also introduced additional complexity and challenges for many organizations, including the need for more sophisticated cloud security solutions.
As organizations move more information and applications to the cloud, there are growing concerns for data security and regulatory compliance. Threats can come from inside and outside the organization—attackers trying to compromise credentials and breach your systems -- or employees not following privacy and encryption policies.
Perimeter-based approaches alone no longer provide the capabilities you need for a future-ready security posture to mitigate risk in cloud-based, mobile-first, remote-work environments. The old way of security, with periodic scans and slow patching across a multitude of endpoints and attack vectors, cannot keep up with the increasing challenges of today’s threat and regulatory landscape.
Microsoft 365 with Built-In Security
Fortunately, Microsoft 365 offers plenty of built-in security capabilities including highly integrated management and security tools for use across multiple clouds and on-premise environments.?
As part of Microsoft 365, Microsoft Defender offers a unified collection of pre- and post-breach security tools and capabilities for the detection, prevention, investigation, and response across all platforms from endpoints to cloud-based services.
The highly integrated design with a centralized portal and dashboard combines protection, detection, investigation, and response to email, collaboration, identity, device, and cloud app threats, all in a central solution that the entire enterprise can use. Security features are available across multiple cloud services and can also be combined with on-premise hybrid environments.?
Microsoft’s Secure Score increases awareness, measurability and control of enterprise security posture with alerts, recommendations and KPIs to continually assess security controls and track remediation efforts.
Additional capabilities offered by Microsoft Security cover the most important enterprise security dimensions:
Identity and Access Management (IAM)
Technology and policies used to secure and manage access to information is commonly a target for cyber attacks. Legacy identity management strategies that worked on-premise are no longer sufficient for cloud integrated environments to enable a proactive security posture.
App Security
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 offers protection against sophisticated attacks such as phishing and zero-day malware, and other attack delivery methods. Advanced threat protection is also available including post-breach investigation, hunting, response, automation, and simulation.
End Point Detection and Response (EDR)
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint offers preventive protection, post-breach detection, automated investigation, and response across operating systems and network devices. This enables you to effectively scale enterprise security, remove security gaps and silos, and gain a comprehensive view of threats for faster response.
Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
In the cloud, a key consideration is that the organization has the responsibility of data protection, not the cloud service provider. That said, Microsoft offers a range of Data Loss Prevention (DLP) capabilities to prioritize, categorize, deploy policies, train users and monitor outcomes.
Who is Responsible for Security in the Cloud?
It is important to understand that you share responsibility for securing your organization with technology providers, particularly your cloud provider, such as Microsoft. This ‘shared responsibility model’ is used to determine which security tasks are handled by the cloud provider and which tasks are handled by you. The responsibilities vary depending on whether the workload is hosted on Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), or in an on-premises datacenter.
For instance, if your data center is on-premise, you own the infrastructure, and therefore bear the responsibility. As you move data to the cloud, data management tasks and related responsibilities for keeping data safe transfer to Microsoft.
The following diagram illustrates the areas of responsibility between you and Microsoft, according to how your enterprise infrastructure is deployed.
Shared Responsibility in the Cloud
Achieve Real-Time, Anywhere Communication and Collaboration
The way teams collaborate and work is changing quickly: Remote teams and meetings. Flexible work schedules and the bridging of physical and digital workspaces. Multiple devices, communication channels and methods of information sharing.
Consistent and clear communication among internal and external teams is essential to maintain productivity and boost employee satisfaction and engagement.
Digital workspace solutions such as Microsoft Teams provides seamless communication solutions to communicate through chats, meetings, and even voice or video calls.
?Microsoft Teams, as part of Microsoft 365, integrates meetings, messaging, and calling services into a single workspace for seamless chat, meetings, calling, file collaboration, and integrated Office apps to power virtual communication and collaboration across locations, time zones, and devices.
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Streamline Document and Knowledge Management
Chances are your organization has an intranet of some kind for basic document management, that is built on solutions such as Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive. However, many organizations may be less familiar with SharePoint’s knowledge management capabilities.
An effective knowledge management system streamlines both knowledge creation and knowledge acquisition so that users can focus solely on high-value tasks. In other words, users can easily generate and distribute value-adding knowledge vs. wasting time finding and organizing files.
?A well-designed knowledge management system takes a basic document repository to the next level to enable teams to get a lot more value from their work.
For instance, Sharepoint allows teams to:
The integration of knowledge management with collaboration tools such as combining Microsoft Sharepoint with Teams streamlines communication even more as it layers on rich collaboration functionality. The native integration of Teams allows employees to communicate instantly and discuss updates, questions or solutions for different documents.?
This unification of functionality provides for faster responses, improved service metrics and enhanced customer satisfaction. Having a single platform helps declutter the digital work environment and helps employees remain connected in a unified workspace.
For instance, answers to resolve a customer query can be initially found in Sharepoint, with additional context added in a Teams chat or channel newsfeed, and the original knowledge updated back to Sharepoint – all within the same interface.
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Power Up Your Business with Intelligence, AI and App Automation
One of best parts of Microsoft 365 is the Power Platform and specifically the Power BI analytics solutions.
Microsoft Power BI is a suite of enterprise ready business analytics tools and services that include business intelligence (BI), reporting, and data visualization. It allows you to visualize data and share insights across your organization. Also, you can embed these insights in your app or website.?
However, Power BI is much more than a data visualization and reporting tool. Power BI integrates with a number of other Microsoft solutions, such as Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform as well as external data sources and apps to extend its use into AI/ML data science, and custom BI app building.
So, you can combine multiple Microsoft services for your business without going through any complex procedures. For example, with Power BI’s cross-platform compatibility, you can share insights across Microsoft Teams and Excel.?
With Microsoft Power BI, you can also get quick AI-powered answers to your business questions. Power BI users can access image recognition and text analytics, create machine learning models, and integrate with Azure Machine Learning to extend the value of their analysis using powerful ML / AI capabilities.
?With PowerApps you can create your own custom, web-based and mobile-friendly apps using low-code tools. A few great use cases for this include employee engagement surveys, cost estimators, budget trackers, to-do lists, ordering apps. These can all be created without the need for coding and extensive IT resources, using pre-build design templates and workflows.
Once built, these Power apps can be easily integrated with Office 365 and Dynamics 365 to gather and utilize business data and help engage customers.
Related: Our Favorite Reasons to Use Power BI
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Boost Employee Engagement with Microsoft Viva
The recently introduced?Microsoft Viva?is an employee experience platform that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into the natural flow of work. As one of the latest additions to the Microsoft 365 suite, Viva adds a new touch of personalization to digital work with user specific recommendations to improve employee productivity and wellbeing, based on usage insights.
Viva Insights allows direct visualization of the workflow, thereby improving the productivity and well-being of employees. Visualizing complex data helps deliver personalized and actionable insights that boost efficiency within an organization. The Viva Learning feature helps to nurture formal and informal learning by engaging team members to learn while on the job helps in faster upskilling.
Essential Steps for a Successful Migration to Microsoft 365
Migrating your business to Microsoft 365 is a comparably straightforward transformation initiative for a few reasons. First, Microsoft provides a wide range of services and?help resources,?learning paths,?adoption guides, and the?FastTrack?program, to make it easier.
Check out the?Microsoft Productivity Library?for additional resources to provide your teams with a solid understanding how Microsoft 365 can improve productivity in specific roles, industries and use cases.
In additional, there are plenty of certified Microsoft service providers who can help as well (Plus+?is a Microsoft Gold Certified provider).
That said, your migration to the cloud will require a varying degree of time and effort, depending on where your organization is on its cloud journey. Your chances of success are dramatically improved with a clear strategy and the right approach to get there. Preparing your infrastructure – and your people – ahead of time will help to avoid un-necessary disruption and delays.
To help streamline your move to Microsoft 365, we’ve put together a list of key steps we help our clients follow for a faster and high-confidence migration.
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Step 1: Set the Vision
A good migration plan starts with a clear?vision and strategy?for what the desired future should be and why it important to get there. Bring your organization together to clearly define (and refine) the objectives and challenges that your migration can and should address. Much of this will revolve around technology; however, you may uncover unseen opportunities to improve work processes along the way.
Ask these questions to dive deeper and align the business around a clear vision:
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Step 2: Assemble Your Team
Transforming to the cloud requires buy-in to your vision and each group has a specific role in the implementation. They should be engaged early and often.
In addition to end-users and project leads, here are some of the most important roles to consider in your migration planning:
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Step 3: Map The Current Environment
Many organizations, especially those who have expanded through mergers and acquisition, or those who may be held back by technical dept, will find this step especially challenging. In those cases, this step may be even more essential for success.
Accomplishing the migration vision first requires an honest assessment of the current state of the technology environment, and helps to answer the following important factors:
Start mapping out the current environment to fully understand the physical infrastructure by taking inventory of where and how applications/workloads are hosted and their network dependencies. You should conduct the assessment with a target setup and infrastructure in mind, and then prepare a gap analysis to prioritize the effort required.
You can improve technical analysis with input from the key team members identified earlier (namely your business owners and SMEs) to understand their workflows, use cases, and business processes for effective data mapping.
Building an accurate and thorough inventory helps to size and prioritize the effort, as well as begin to roadmap tasks to remove redundant and/or un-needed infrastructure and data, all of which will inform a more effective migration.
Step 4: Choose a Migration Approach
With any migration, the goal is to execute as flawlessly as possible, with minimal downtime or lost data. Fortunately, there is more than one approach to achieve this goal, depending on the desired timeline, effort and risk involved.
One approach commonly used in large organizations to reduce risk is the phased migration, which migrates users in waves by department, business unit or location. A staged migration is a good choice when migrating over 2 thousand users, or when mailbox performance is an issue.?
A faster approach for smaller, less complex migrations is to do a full cutover of an entire tenant in one shot. A cutover, or “flipping of the switch”, may be a viable option with sufficient staging and prep work ahead of time.
An in-between option is a hybrid migration which allows for the previous on-prem and new cloud tenants to co-exist while moving select number of users or departments (at a time) until a desirable full cut-over end-state is achievable.?This approach may be desirable when system incompatibilities delay a full migration. However, a hybrid server is required to host the connection between the old on-premise and new Microsoft 365 environments.
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Step 5: Evaluate Your Security Program
Every pre-migration checklist should include a security evaluation to identify and evaluate current app and data security control features and any vulnerability gaps that may need to be filled as part of the migration. These?security risk and control assessments?form the first stage of a comprehensive and proactive approach to cybersecurity and risk management.?
Microsoft Office 365 comes with several default security settings that help you to secure your digital workspace data against common threats. However, depending on the nature of your environment, you may find that additional controls are needed. Identity and access management, as well as message hygiene and securing endpoints (e.g., mobile devices) should be key focuses for the assessment.
Additionally, you’ll want to ensure you have a reliable and fast response disaster and incident recovery plan in place.
From this evaluation, you may opt to strengthen security posture by implementing best practices such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), advanced threat protection and other multi-layered security features supported in Microsoft 365 and Azure.
Microsoft 365 Security Assessment
Develop and maintain a strong security posture with Microsoft 365 Security and industry best practices. Learn more →
Step 6: Consider How a Cloud Migration Provider Can Help
Migrating your workspace to the cloud doesn’t have to be hard. However, for organizations taking it on for the first time, it can be daunting, with plenty of pitfalls to avoid (see below).
Having the right technical expertise and industry-specific knowledge to evaluate, implement and optimize your workspace technology is essential to achieve your vision and maximize return on technology investment.
If you’re a mid-sized enterprise, getting help from a cloud services provider will lend plenty of benefits and position you to better adapt, accelerate and win. Here are the top benefits we see our clients achieve by working with Plus+ on their migration efforts.?
Keep pace with trends and competition
You’re busy running your business and don’t have the time or expertise to keep up with the rapid pace of technology. Likewise, technological advances are fast enabling new sources of competitive advantage that can take your business to the next level. Experts with cross-industry perspective and deep technical expertise can help you determine what is needed to optimize operational excellence and innovate new ways of working to stay on track and get ahead.?
Avoid delays and accelerate time to value
Taking the wrong path at key inflection points can delay your cloud migration to a standstill; or end it in a very costly failure. Having the guidance and implementation from a certified Microsoft cloud expert can significantly improve your chances for a smooth, high-confidence migration.
Maximize return and adoption
Even with perfect technical implementation, achieving full incorporation and adoption of workspace technology remains a challenge for many organizations. They struggle to see real business value from a shift to remote / hybrid work. Highly experienced cloud migration experts know how to guide these efforts, before, during and after migration to ensure maximum technology and business returns.
Avoid These Common Mistakes
Even with a thoughtfully planned migration strategy, you will still encounter inflection points that can lead you down the path to success, delay, or even outright failure, depending on the decisions made at each point. Here are the most common inflection points that influence the success of your migration.?
Considering Migration as Just an “IT project”
As with most digital transformation efforts, one of the biggest mistakes organizations make to underestimate the need for business stakeholder and end-user involvement from vision setting all the way through to adoption. Close involvement and support from business owners, subject-matter experts and early adopters help ensure close alignment with the migration approach and solidify support for organizational changes required to generate business value.?
Short-Changing Governance
Be sure to take into account relevant governmental policies, industry standards, organization-specific business needs, and other regulatory requirements that may shape the migration path. Early planning helps to implement (and enforce) compliance processes, procedures and controls into the migration path and reduce delays. Clear-eyed consideration of governance also helps to discover the potential for additional tools to help manage compliance. For instance, tools such as Microsoft Purview are helpful in managing data retention and records management.?
Missing the Potential
Many organizations may not see the full set of potential benefits possible from their migration effort across the entire organization. We recommend treating the migration as a stimulus for business innovation and culture change. During the initial vision setting stage, and into scoping activities, try to inspire new ideas for how to boost innovation and performance through a flexible, hybrid work models supported with best-in-class digital workplace technology.
?As you do this, articulate a prioritized set of scenarios and features for delivering one or more of the top-level benefits mentioned above.
Not Prioritizing Adoption
Optimizing the business value of your Microsoft 365 migration ultimately depends upon one key factor: adoption. By adoption, we mean incorporating the right technology fully into the organization with a focus on enabling high value use cases and ease-of-use without sacrificing security.
Even with perfect technical execution, many organizations still struggle because they lack full adoption. And because the success of hybrid/remote work is enabled by technology, much of the burden for success has shifted to IT teams, with organizations looking to their technology teams to make everyone ‘remote-work ready’.
To maximize adoption, prepare an adoption strategy that includes an assessment of organizational readiness, assembles the right team, and utilizes a phased rollout that allows the organization to achieve full adoption at healthy pace.
Trust Our Experience to Move Your Workspace to the Cloud
Migrating your workspace to the cloud is not simply a matter of upgrading software and moving data to the cloud. While technical implementation is an important part, so is having a strategic approach to meeting business needs and achieving full adoption. Additionally, you’ll want to assess to what extent risk and security gaps will influence your effort.?
As a?Microsoft Gold Partner with over 20 years of cloud migration experience, we know how to help enterprises bring people, data, and communications together with Microsoft 365 to enable next-level collaboration with enterprise-level security.
We take the stress out of your Microsoft 365 migration.
Plus+ provides technology and business expertise combined with industry-specific perspectives to help you deliver a seamless, secure migration that also optimizes business value. Take advantage of our readiness assessment, strategy and design, implementation, custom application development, and post-launch services to take the stress out of your move to the cloud.
Speak with one of our solution advisors?to get started or to accelerate your journey to the future of work.
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