We help Executives Reduce IT Risk during M&A

A key outcome of M&A is the cost reduction provided by successfully merging disparate technology platforms and systems. A key risk factor is when these technology systems don’t merge.  Office 365 is an extremely pervasive email and collaboration platform, and there is a high probability that your merging organizations will both use Office 365. Alternately, you may want to use a merger or acquisition as an opportunity to consolidate your operations and collaboration infrastructure within Office 365.

The consolidation of Office 365 tenant environments isn’t an easy process.  If your team is doing its first Office 365 consolidation, the success of your M&A is at risk. Here are a few reasons why:

• Vanity domains that an organization uses as their primary and secondary email address domains can be verified and active in only one Office 365 tenant. To migrate from one Office 365 tenant to another, you must remove these vanity domains from all Office 365 objects in an acquired organization’s Office 365 tenant before setting up new accounts in the destination or acquiring organizations Office 365 tenant.
• It creates the opportunity for email and productivity disruption since the acquired company’s mailboxes won’t exist for a period of time, and any email sent to these accounts will NDR (have a non-delivery error message sent to the sender).
• It’s time intensive, since you typically cannot automate the migration. Pilot tests are also difficult to do because all of Microsoft’s published recommendations and third-party tools use the “all-or-none” cutover migration method where all mailboxes and accounts are migrated at once. This is extremely unmanageable from an end-user change management and IT help desk impact perspective for mid-market and enterprise-size organizations.
• You must migrate all Office 365 Groups and OneDrive files directly from one Office 365 tenant to the other. Each involves a separate process and project to migrate to the destination Office 365 tenant.

For these reasons and more, you need an experienced team of IT experts at your side throughout your consolidation. At Stratus Innovations Group, we’ve helped numerous companies with IT migrations and consolidations that successfully address these concerns, limit the impact on their IT help desks, and make them as seamless as possible to their end-user communities.

Call Stratus Innovations Group today at 844-561-6721 or fill out a quick and simple contact form and lets discuss how we can work together to accelerate the time to value of your M&A activities when multiple Office 365 environments are involved.