Before understanding the critical difference between Cutover and Staged Migrations, we want to emphasize that Cloudiway is more than a migration tool. It is essential for us to apprehend the time it will take to move all of your data over to avoid throttles and bandwidth constraints.
Two of the most common migration strategies are cutover and staged migrations. Cutover strategies involve migrating all mailboxes over a weekend, ready for your users on Monday morning. Staged strategies provide more flexible migration options.
Conclusively, the right migration plan for your organization will depend on the technical, business, and cultural factors at play.
1. The Cutover Migration Strategy
You migrate everybody over a weekend for example. This strategy is the simplest to implement. You can migrate your mailboxes in a single pass migration or envisage a pre-staging strategy where you run multiple migration passes.
A cutover migration is, therefore, a strategy where the entire company is switched at the same time.
The Cutover Migration Benefits
- The fastest, simplest form of migration.
- Your users can start using the new mail system immediately.
- New emails are received in the target messaging system.
- Old emails are migrated in a single pass.
The Cutover Migration Considerations
You can combine your cutover migration with pre-staging if required.
In this case, during the days or weeks leading up to your cutover, you would migrate all emails up to a week or so ago along with calendars and contacts, then on the day of your cutover, you would run a quick delta pass to migrate the remaining items.
2. Staged Migration Strategy
A staged migration allows you to migrate batches of mailboxes over a few weeks or months. This strategy is useful for migrations with large volumes of data (Large mailboxes or numerous mailboxes) and if you estimate that you won’t be able to do your migration over a single weekend.
Cloudiway offers you additional flexibility in your approach to a staged migration. For example, you could migrate the last six months of emails over a weekend and leave older emails and email archives to be migrated after cutover, explaining to users that their older emails will appear soon.
Pre-staging is also an option on the Cloudiway platform. For example, you could perform a multi-pass migration to migrate most mailbox items before completing the final cutover.
During the days or weeks leading up to your cutover, you would migrate all emails up to a week or so ago along with calendars and contacts, then on the day of your cutover, you would run a quick delta pass to migrate the remaining items.
Cloudiway provides a number of options to help you find the best strategy for a staged mail migration. We provide coexistence services, and batch migration of users, which you can define in any way you like. Basically, you can choose who, when and what gets migrated during each pass.
Staged Migration Benefits
- Many flexible migration strategies when using the Cloudiway platform.
- Allows more time before final cutover, avoiding tight deadlines.
- Complex migrations can be completed without disrupting end-users.
- It can be performed in batches according to your needs.
Staged Migration Considerations
Staged migrations tend to be more complicated than single cutover migrations. Therefore, it’s essential to plan your approach thoroughly before starting your migration.
A well-planned migration can reduce business risks, improve end-user satisfaction and help your organization unlock the benefits of the cloud. Contact us and prepare to make your cloud migration as smooth as possible.