Migration Phase One
One of the big questions to answer, is how the migration will happen. Will there be a single cutover to Microsoft 365, typically over one weekend, or will it be broken up into phases over a set time period. The two main factors in this decision are the amount of content to be migrated, and the ability to manage the change in the organization.
Starting with the amount of content, it is important to be aware that there are limitations on how fast content can be migrated into Microsoft 365. With Sharegate we typically see 1-2 GB per hour of content being migrated with a single workstation. What does this mean? Here’s some timing estimates for reference, using a conservative throughput of 1 GB per hour.
| Content Size | Number of Workstations | Duration (hours) | Duration (days) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 100 GB | 1 | 100 | 4 |
| 1 TB | 1 | 1000 | 42 |
| 1 TB | 5 | 200 | 8 |
While it would appear that even the first small scenario cannot be completed over a weekend, there is another factor to consider. Often much of the content is not actively changing, and it can be migrated ahead of the actual cutover weekend. One or more preparatory migrations can be done, and then a final incremental migration done on the cutover weekend.
Our largest migration to date was the migration of 14 million documents, with a total size of 5 TB. Using a series of incremental migrations leading up to go live weekend, the final incremental migration was completed in 24 hours on cutover weekend, leaving the entire Sunday available for business validation and testing.