How to Migrate the Department of Defense to Office 365

The following is an excerpt from an article of Jay’s from the AvePoint Blog. Click here for the full article.

It goes without saying that the logistics of merging or breaking up two organizations can be tricky. A simple merger/acquisition in the commercial space can span years of coordinating systems, data discovery, and migration. It’s easy for data and users to get lost in the shuffle if the proper planning and validation procedures aren’t put in place at the beginning.

In that same vein, the Department of Defense has two big challenges on its hands:

The divesture of the million cross-command users in the CVR environment, and
The continued merger of command collaboration environments across each branch of the DOD into centralized tenants for each branch.

An effort to merge multiple commands into a single collaboration environment poses its own challenges such as information architecture, bad or stale data, ownership, and identification of authoritative sources, throttling, etc. In CVR especially, dozens of commands and agencies across the DOD have their data intermingled into a single temporary Office 365 tenant, and divesting these into their own branch-specific tenants will be a daunting challenge for those that want their data out to coordinate A) which data is whose, B) where their data is, and C) where it needs to go.

With that in mind, CVR has been labeled as temporary and the government’s official position is that the environment and data that resides within will be deleted in June 2021. Some commands may accept this fate while others may want to take steps to retain their collaboration data that’s been created through the life of the environment.

Now, be it divesting from CVR or merging into a centralized tenant, you must consider two things:

How do you approach migrating your data?
- Discovery
- Plan
- Move the Data
- Validate
- Common Pitfalls
What technology do you use?

For details on this and the rest of the series from AvePoint and our partners, supporting the DOD’s move to Microsoft 365’s Modern Workplace platform, click through or click on one of the below articles from the series: