Throughout 2021, it is estimated that 78% of employees in mid-to-large organizations will leverage the capabilities of Microsoft 365.  With a move to Microsoft 365, a myriad of new applications becomes available including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive, Teams, PowerApps, and more.  While organizations who make the investment into Microsoft 365 want to maximize this investment by adopting all of these new applications, a move to Microsoft 365 is a daunting digital transformation, involving large scale data migrations, implementing new security and compliance practices, and more.  

Many organizations look to outsource solutions and services that few can perform in house.  When exploring the market for different vendors to perform specific siloed tasks, organizations make the mistake of hiring multiple vendors, or GSI’s that use multiple vendors.  By doing this these organizations are forced to juggle unsynchronized projects or pay heavy premiums to GSI’s who still ultimately have challenges with synchronicity.

Our Microsoft Companion program facilitates your organization’s end-to-end journey and transition into Microsoft 365.  Through this program, our PremCloud team of experts becomes an extension of your IT team, working side-by-side to deliver an accelerated and productive digital transformation.  With our dedicated and experienced Microsoft professionals responsible for the productivity and deliverables of your organization’s move to Microsoft 365, your team can shift their focus toward other strategic business initiatives and accelerate your time-to-value with Microsoft 365.  The PremCloud Microsoft Companion Program is split into four phases, Discovery, Pre-Migration Governance, Migration, and Post Migration Management.

The first phase in the Microsoft Companion is an in-depth consultation to define pre-requisitory and suggested pre-migration governance plans, project strategy, timelines, and outcomes, as well as best practices and available solutions/services for ongoing, strategic support, and management of your Microsoft 365 tenant.  

• Determine deployment goals.
• Inventory your current environment.
• Develop deployment plans.
• Develop a pre-migration governance plan.
• Develop Microsoft 365 subscription plans.
• Develop a post-migration management plan.

During the pre-migration governance phase, the PremCloud team will set up and create your Microsoft 365 tenant, as well as enact, agreed-upon governance strategies and policies in preparation for big data migrations.  PremCloud Pre-Migration strategies include:

• Assessment of unstructured repositories, and remediation activities, to identify, search, delete, and copy data powered by Data Detect.
• Archive data consolidation, for unified Discovery and end-user experience, and accelerated Exchange migration powered by EAS.

During the transition phase, PremCloud will reconfigure on-premise applications that will be integrated with Microsoft 365 and perform the migration of on-premise messaging and collaboration applications and data repositories to Microsoft 365.  PremCloud will perform these migrations simultaneously, providing daily and weekly tracking updates and providing a holistic view across the entire estate under migration.

Once fully transitioned to Microsoft 365, the PremCloud team suggested the Implementation of ongoing security and governance services, solutions, and practices powered by our PremCloud offerings including:

• EAS Journaling as a Service.
• PremCloud Connect, Anything to Anywhere Data Capture.
• PremCloud File Governance.