Cloud & Microsoft 365 Migrations
Move tenants, mailboxes and workloads without losing weekends: designed in advance, executed in batched waves behind a pilot that is allowed to fail, with coexistence keeping mail and files flowing the whole way.
BitTitan / Quest / ShareGate / Native
5-10 user pilot + batched waves
2-24 weeks by tier
Mailbox routing + file shortcuts
These are design rules of the wave model, written into the wave plan and the runbooks of the delivery kit below, not aspirations for the pitch deck.
Nobody migrates for fun. These are the four reasons people call.
The M&A clock is running
Acquisition or divestiture with a TSA that expires whether you are ready or not. Day-1 requirements (mail, sign-in) get their own workstream, and the waves phase per entity.
A decade of SharePoint and archives
Mailbox archives, PSTs in odd corners, sites nobody owns. Discovery sizes it honestly, the stale list gets an objection window, and garbage does not pay to fly.
Leaving the old supplier
The tenant lives under an MSP relationship you want out of. We move you to a tenant you own, with the Exit Kit discipline applied from the first day, not the last.
On-prem workloads out of road
Exchange or file servers pinned by hardware age and licence terms. Waves move the users; the file-server workstream runs in parallel with its own fidelity checks.
The waves, the bridge, and the kit that ships both.
Three views of the same engagement: the wave plan with its pilot gate, the coexistence bridge that keeps both tenants working mid-flight, and the actual delivery kit, folder by folder. When a prospect asks "what do we actually get?", this is the answer.
Four artefacts, all in your repository.
A signed wave plan with rollback criteria
Who moves when, sized from pilot-measured throughput, with blackout dates honoured and a written DNS schedule. Changes happen in writing, never in a corridor.
A pilot that is allowed to fail
5-10 real users through the full path, measured against seven criteria. Waves start from a signed pilot report, and a pilot that cannot fail is a demo.
Validation report against success criteria
Wave-by-wave evidence: sync logs, mail-flow matrices, fidelity samples, ticket trends. The report that gates source decommissioning.
30-day hypercare with a named engineer
Not a queue: a name, a rota and a daily triage in week one. Recurring themes become fix tasks, and the trend line is part of the closure evidence.
In scope
- Discovery + dependency mapping
- Tool selection + license procurement
- Wave plan, pilot, production cutover
- Validation against success criteria
- 30-day hypercare + source decommissioning
Deliberately out of scope
- On-prem Exchange / SharePoint server migration (Hybrid / Modern Auth required as prerequisite)
- Legacy NDR / file-share migration over 50TB (custom scope)
- Custom Power Platform / Dynamics 365 migration
- ISV-licensed workload migration without vendor cooperation
Assess first. Then fixed scope, never T&M.
The tier scope sheet gets signed during discovery, so "what is included" is a document, never a memory.
Assessment
Two weeks. You get the plan, the price of the move, and the truth.
- Discovery questionnaire + estate volumetrics
- Dependency mapping: apps bound to identity and mail
- ADR set: strategy, tooling, coexistence
- Wave plan v1 with rollback criteria and DNS schedule
- Tooling licence quote, procured in your name
Outcome
A migration you can price, schedule and defend before committing to it.
Delivery
Pilot, waves, cutover, hypercare, decommission. The whole arc.
- Coexistence built and tested before the pilot books a window
- Pilot wave with a signed report gating production
- Batched waves: mail, OneDrive/SharePoint, Teams, identity
- User comms per wave (T-7, T-1, day 1) from the branded pack
- 30-day hypercare, validation report, source decommissioning, Exit Kit
Outcome
Everyone on the target tenant, evidence filed, source retired without folklore.
M&A Programme
Phased integration for deals, TSAs and multi-entity moves.
- Day-1 requirements workstream: mail and sign-in at close date
- TSA-aligned phasing with late domain release
- Multi-entity wave plan per legal entity or geography
- Weekly steering pack for integration leadership
- Legal-hold and eDiscovery coordination with counsel
Outcome
The integration IT workstream stops being the deal risk everyone whispers about.
Honest answers to the questions buyers actually ask.
How long does a tenant-to-tenant migration take?
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SMB (under 100 seats): 2-6 weeks end-to-end. Mid-market (100-500 seats): 6-12 weeks. Enterprise (1000+ seats) or M&A under regulatory deadline: 12-24 weeks with phased waves.
Can users keep working during the migration?
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Yes. Wave-based migration means users move in batches; pre-wave coexistence (mailbox forwarding, file shortcuts) keeps the business running. Big-bang cutovers are only used when the wave model is impossible.
What about Teams chat history and shared channels?
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Native Microsoft cross-tenant migration now supports Teams chat with caveats. We document the caveats and tool around the gaps (typically with BitTitan or Quest).
Will we lose a weekend? What actually goes down?
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The wave model exists so the answer is "almost nothing". Mail keeps flowing through coexistence routing during the whole engagement; each wave cuts over in an evening window and users re-confirm MFA next morning (budgeted at about five minutes each, with screenshots sent the day before). Big-bang weekends are what this service replaces.
What happens to Teams chat history? Be honest.
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Honestly: it depends on the tool and Microsoft API limits, and anyone promising a perfect copy is selling. Channel messages migrate with threading limits; 1:1 and group chats typically land as searchable archives. Exactly what carries over in your case is written down and signed at pilot, before any wave is scheduled.
Who pays for the migration tooling?
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Tool licences (BitTitan, Quest, ShareGate or native, chosen by measured volume) are quoted transparently at the Assessment and procured in your name where the vendor allows it. They are a project cost you see, never a margin we hide.
We have legal holds and eDiscovery cases in flight. Blocker?
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A constraint, not a blocker. Hold users are flagged per wave, holds are verified pre- and post-move, and the compliance matrix in the delivery kit tracks chain of custody with evidence links. Where a hold requires source data to survive, it is exported to immutable storage before decommissioning.
Who actually does the work?
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One senior engineer, the same one you meet on the discovery call. No account managers, no offshore hand-off, no junior rotation. You get a single Slack channel and a direct line to the person running your waves.
A migration is a beginning, not an ending.
Secure Remote Workforce
The architecture narrative for where the migrated tenant should end up.
OpenMicrosoft 365 Tenant Hardening
The target-tenant baseline we verify before the first wave lands on it.
OpenCloud Licensing & Procurement
Target licensing staged per wave through Pax8, at vendor list price.
OpenAgree the rollback point before the first wave moves.
Every wave gets entry criteria, a named owner and a way back. The workshop settles those for your first wave and the hypercare window behind it.