Migrating Complex Email Services to the Cloud

Background

Our client is an Ontario higher education institution that employs almost 4,000 staff and faculty members who support 50,000 students each year.

As a higher education institution, they pride themselves on personal development and education in a modern learning ecosystem, which includes onsite and online learning. Their success has allowed them to grow internationally, opening satellite education facilities in over 5 different countries.

Challenge

Like any large, mature organization, legacy systems with years of data were existent.

Migrating to a new, more sophisticated system takes time and effective planning. Technical complexities, user awareness and training, and the need for zero downtime means IT must be well prepared for the transition.

For this institution, one critical initiative was moving their mail services to the cloud utilizing Microsoft Office 365’s Exchange Online.

Hundreds of thousands of mailboxes for the student portion
Critical mailboxes with large storage requirements (+100Gb mailboxes)
Complex shared mailboxes between faculty, who are also part-time, continuous learning students.
Complex mail flows
Critical business function, with zero downtime
Tight timeline – all mailboxes needed to cut over and flawlessly working before the end of the school year

Solution

Elastify conducted a migration planning assessment to map out the complexities and end-state for the new mail deployment. Using the results of our assessment, we developed a migration and adoption roadmap that included the following:

Develop a detailed project plan, with key stakeholders and support staff to successfully execute the migration.
Conduct weekly touchpoints on status updates, escalations, and paths forward.
Execute with the top technical delivery professionals, who have practical experience, working in similar complex environments.
Implement mail safeguards to protect users and data, which align with the institution’s policies.

Results

Following the Elastify roadmap not only made the migration smoother, it minimized downtime and accelerated acceptance and use of the new system.

Hundreds of thousands of student mailboxes migrated

Through this assessment, Elastify was able to uncover critical issues, which required immediate remediation. The findings were documented in a way that could be easily consumed by all levels of the executive team.

Today, Elastify continues to support our client with key remediation activities, both locally and globally.

Want to get started with your project? Connect with the team at Elastify to begin!

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