Migrating to Office 365 is becoming increasingly popular among businesses, both large and small. Although Microsoft offers some more beneficial features such as security and reliability, companies are still hesitant to migrate due to implementation challenges. Deploying Office 365 may seem very simple, but there are a wide variety of considerations that depend on an organization’s unique business demands. Listed below are the top 5 risks businesses face when implementing Microsoft Office 365.
1. Access problems
2. Risk mitigation
3. Security messaging
4. Corrupted data
5. Migration challenges
Access issues: A company’s core infrastructure and domain focus is a critical component to success. Domain access (domain verification with clouds) is vital to start your Exchange Online deployment. Those companies that do not have access to their domains will be at risk and will face implementation delays.
Mitigate risk: In Office 365, there are several possibilities that a failure in email, online protection, or even authentication could be the reason for a complete failure; so if you recognize the possibility of Office 365 being down, you’ll need a plan. about how your users will access and use email during that downtime. You need to get a workaround to keep your services running even if Office 365 is offline. There are third-party policies and solutions to efficiently handle situations like this.
Messaging security: Spam filtering is one of the biggest challenges during an Office 365 deployment. With on-premises Exchange, there are many vendor options for providing layers of security and hygiene for your messaging, some gateway-based and others on the client. But when you move to Office 365, the options dwindle significantly. Although Office 365 uses Exchange Online Protection, it does not address the more advanced attacks that are performed at the connection level as well as the email content level.
Data loss: Data loss is often a major concern for Office 365 customers, because Microsoft’s backup policies cannot guarantee a complete and prompt restoration of lost data. Even when the data is recoverable, the process is long and complicated, and retention policies vary for each application included in the cloud platform. A new data retention policy introduced in Outlook can be a relief for office clients to some extent. But retention policies can only protect you from data loss to a limited extent and are not thought to be a perfect backup solution.
Migration challenges: Office 365 migration can be one of the easiest things to do, or one of the most challenging. It mainly depends on the size and complexity of the environment in which it runs. If you maintain an on-premises Active Directory environment and want to migrate, this will not be an easy procedure. For a successful migration, identify the missing pieces in your current environment.
Once you’ve identified the challenges, seek help from some efficient third-party vendors/solutions that can probably make your migration and running in Office 365 a much smoother process.
