When planning to migrate to Microsoft 365, it is crucial to perform proper security assessment and ensure there are no loopholes to avoid migration disruption. Your IT team must perform comprehensive security checks to fully safeguard your organization’s migration from external threats.
Here are some of the critical security-related steps your organization must take when planning to migrate to Microsoft 365 in the most secure way.
1. Check the Tool’s Compliance with Security Regulations
One of the most important security assessments to perform is to check and ensure that the migration tool you plan to use complies with the industry-standard security and data privacy regulations. This is especially important if your organization is planning to move from a standalone cloud storage platform to a robust cloud suite like Microsoft 365, such as from Box to OneDrive and SharePoint Online.
It’s best to opt for an enterprise-grade migration solutions provider like CloudFuze that helps ensure a high level of security throughout the migration with approaches such as:
- OAuth 2.0 for cloud authentication
- Data access at the API level
- Encryption of data during the migration
- Option to deploy the migration tool into in-house servers
2. Ensure Proper Sanity Testing of the Migration Infrastructure
Many businesses (small and large) overlook the importance of preparing the migration infrastructure from the security point of view. Although this step may seem trivial, your IT team must not miss out on it. Make sure that the migration service provider performs proper sanity testing of the servers to be used for your organization’s migration project.
It is best to use dedicated servers for maximum security and performance, especially when migrating a lot of users and data from one robust cloud suite to another, such as from Google Drive to OneDrive. With dedicated servers, your IT team can eliminate the risk of external threats while ensuring optimum performance with no downtime.
3. Perform the Entire Migration in Phases
By trying to migrate everything all at once to Microsoft 365, your company stands at the risk of downtime through API throttling, which, in turn, can raise other security risks. Therefore, it is always best to perform the entire migration in phases.
Segregate the total number of users and data to migrate to Microsoft 365 in several batches and migrate them sequentially. This way, your IT team can also simplify the validation process and ensure all batches are migrated securely and accurately.
4. Ensure Availability of Dedicated Point of Contacts
During the planning stage, coordinate with the migration vendor and have dedicated point of contacts assigned to your organization, such as point of contact for project coordination, another dedicated point of contact for issue escalations, etc.
With this approach, you can streamline communication around the security, performance, progress, and results of the entire migration project. It also becomes simple to troubleshoot any issue caused by unforeseen roadblocks.
5. Perform Post-Migration Security Checks
After the Microsoft 365 migration is completed, make sure to perform in-depth post-migration security checks to make sure that the integrity of the user accounts and their files and folders have not been compromised.
With proper post-migration security checks, your organization can onboard users to Microsoft 365 in the most secure ways and ensure smooth operations continuity. In other words, performing post-migration checks plays a critical role in streamline change management and lowering the risk of user impact.
