Microsoft’s cloud-based service, Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Office 365), has become very popular in recent years. This service offers numerous features and benefits that add significant value to businesses. With Microsoft 365’s tools and features, businesses can boost productivity, security, scalability, integration, and collaboration, operating more effectively and efficiently.
In a local setup, businesses face the costs of maintaining local data centers and the administrative burden. They also need security experts, storage experts, network experts, and systems experts to manage the local system. Thus, migrating from a local setup to the cloud-based Microsoft 365 makes more sense. This article explores the importance and benefits of migrating to Microsoft 365 (M365).
Collaboration and Productivity
Microsoft 365 offers many collaboration tools that help increase productivity. In Microsoft 365, applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook work seamlessly together.
With OneDrive, users can share file links and simultaneously open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. They can co-author documents with automatic background versioning and saving. Users can create Office 365 Groups, where a set of users can share a mailbox, planner, SharePoint site, OneNote, and create Microsoft Teams. This enhances group collaboration and boosts productivity.
From an administrative perspective, Microsoft 365 simplifies IT management. Subscriptions like Microsoft 365 Business Premium and add-ons with Azure allow users to join devices with their online accounts, manage device security, and perform patching and vulnerability assessments. This streamlines the operating system, applications, and IT operations.
Facilitating Daily Tasks with AI
Microsoft continuously evolves its system with new features, security, and functionality. The latest addition to Microsoft 365 includes Artificial Intelligence (AI) called CoPilot. This feature assists with daily tasks.
For example, CoPilot can summarize important points from meetings, draft documents from other documents (like proposals or contracts), draft emails, and perform various other functions to streamline daily routines.
Cost Savings
A Microsoft 365 license is much cheaper compared to a local server. With the cloud system, you can scale as needed without additional costs for unused licenses. In a local system, over-provisioning for users leads to unnecessary expenses.
Additionally, local IT infrastructure requires periodic refreshes, typically every five years, due to end-of-support and end-of-life for systems, hardware, and software.
With Microsoft 365, Microsoft handles connectivity and underlying hardware, so you only need to focus on account security and data governance.
Resilience and Business Continuity
Maintaining a local setup requires a Database Availability Group (DAG) with multiple sites in different regions, which incurs high expenses and operational costs for site connectivity and multiple data centers. With Microsoft 365, these concerns are managed by Microsoft, offering a 99.9% Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Security and Compliance
Data security is crucial for businesses. Microsoft 365 provides robust security features like identity management, conditional access, data loss prevention (DLP), and more.
Conclusion
Microsoft 365 offers numerous features and services that enhance collaboration, productivity, and security, along with setup feasibility and scalability. These benefits encourage businesses to migrate from local setups to Microsoft 365. Migration options include cutover migration, full/simple hybrid systems, and staged migrations, each with its own features and benefits. It’s essential to ensure that the Exchange Server is compliant and fully patched for data migration. The Exchange Server must be running, and the databases must be mounted.
Migration should be as easy and reliable as possible, but this is not always natively feasible. Third-party tools like Stellar Converter for EDB can simplify migration. This application can open live and orphaned databases without size limits and export EDB file data to PST and various formats. It can directly migrate database file items to Microsoft 365, including user mailboxes, user archives, disabled mailboxes, and public folders. With features like automatic mailbox matching, priority exports, and parallel exports, this application makes migration quick and straightforward.
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