Cloud migrations have boomed over the last few years and it is easy to see why as cloud solutions provide huge benefits to companies of all sizes, especially around collaboration and allowing work to be accessed from multiple devices, wherever you are.

These migrations can sometimes place a drain on your organisation’s resources. One way to reduce this cost is to use a ‘free’ migration platform – right? This really depends on what you class as a cost? You need to take into consideration how much the cost saving is vs the extra effort involved. 

To get the most out of your migration it is important that you do not just view it as a simple lift and shift exercise, the whole point of migration is to improve. To be able to do this you need to understand what data you hold and what your current environment looks like so you can properly plan your SharePoint migration. 

This is where the problem can lie, free migration platforms have limited features and the lack of these features can impact the planning and execution of your migration.  

With Office 365 tenant to tenant migrations, you will need to not only merge multiple Active Directories but also understand and set relevant administration rights, sensitivity labels, migrate meta data, plan the structure of the SharePoint data and so much more. Unfortunately, these features are not all available with free migration platforms.  

Whilst the migration platform cost is free, a poorly executed migration can negatively impact your team. This is not only in terms of the time it will take for your IT team to sort out the problems, which include understanding the sensitivity of/resetting permissions for each document, but also for the wider business. 

Additionally, what happens when you are unsure of a certain element and you are looking for advice or want to understand best practice? Unfortunately, nothing, as support does not come with a free platform. 

Taking all of this into consideration, migrating with a free migration platform can turn out to be more expensive than using a complete migration platform like Casper365. 

Casper365 scans your site collections and provides you with a detailed report showing where the data is held, when it was last updated and which users have access, helping you to understand what to include in your migration plan. It also helps you understand your sensitivity filters, providing full governance and access control during your migration. Plus, it has the ability to produce a pre–migration report that can be used for sign-off, if required.  

Once the pre–migration is signed off, the job can be scheduled, and the migration can happen. When completed, a post-migration report is created to update you with the result: what migrated successfully, if any issues arose and how they were resolved.    

This not only allows you to use that data for communication to other departments, but it also provides a complete audit trial as all data gets uploaded to a site collection on your tenant. This means in a year from now when someone asks a question relating to that data, you have it on record. 

Add to this that with Casper365 you have the full support of the expert Business Cloud Integration team behind you ready to answer any questions or help you move forward with best practice. 

Choosing the right tool helps to propel your migration project and create a successful migration that gets your whole organisation to value faster.