High Street Retailer Office 365 Migration

The client was conducting a migration from on-premise Exchange to Exchange Online.  The existing email environment included an Enterprise Vault (EV) email archive solution that extended to 12TB in size.  TrueSwift was engaged to manage the EV data to ensure all emails were securely and efficiently migrated to new target platforms so the EV environment could be safely decommissioned.

The EV archive contained email relating to both current users as well as legacy data for those that had left the organisation.  There was a requirement for live users’ data to be migrated to the new email platform for seamless end-user access whilst the remaining data needed to be retained in an open format for compliance and retention purposes.

The EV environment had been in place for many years and the underlying infrastructure was deemed to be ‘fragile’.  The client requested that no additional load was to be placed on the production EV environment during the migration.

The use of the TrueSwift Migration Factory™ (TMF) solution was contracted which addressed all of the client’s stringent requirements.

The fully hosted, fully managed solution facilitated the swift and efficient migration of data from the EV source platform to appropriate target platforms.

A secure replica of the client’s EV environment was hosted in TrueSwift’s UK, ISO27001 data centre. EV data for live users was directly transferred via fast, dedicated network links to Exchange Online with zero load being placed on the client’s production EV environment.  Legacy data relating to non-live users was extracted into a standard ‘open’ format that could be later accessed on demand by the client.

The project was run over 3 phases including

• Live user archive pilot
• Production live users and
• Non-live legacy archives

The production migration to Office 365 was carried out in batches of users, supplied to us by the client on regular intervals. This interlaced neatly with the client’s user mailbox migration to Office 365 and shortly after their primary Exchange mailbox had been transferred to Office 365, the user could seamlessly access their EV archived data.

For EV archives associated with non-live users, data was efficiently extracted and stored in a recognised ‘open’ format allowing the client to retain the data in an easily accessible manner on demand and in accordance with their internal data retention policies.

Throughout the engagement, weekly calls were held with the client to keep them up to date with progress and any issues.  Weekly reports were also generated providing detailed insight into performance and other throughput metrics.