ShareGate Strategist Shares Microsoft Migration Best Practices

Organizations of all sizes are increasingly dealing with migration fatigue– the result of repeated and poorly managed migrations that they have attempted over the years.

Migration fatigue can have a significant impact on your organization. It can be costly, burn out your IT teams, lead to governance drift, and cause the loss of critical institutional knowledge that organizations can’t afford to replace.

To learn more about how to break the cycle of poor migrations and prevent them from being a barrier to growth, Channel Insider sat down with Richard Harbridge, Microsoft MVP and migration strategist at ShareGate, a migration and governance solution for Microsoft 365.

Risks of unaddressed mitigation fatigue

While there are several significant downsides to migration fatigue, there are also drawbacks to not addressing mitigation fatigue at all.

According to Harbridge, trust is a significant factor that can break down when mitigation fatigue is not addressed.

“I’ll tell a real story. There’s this mid-market merger, and they had a fixed close date like everyone does, and the goal is to maintain the productivity and meet the date,” Harbridge explained. “They had a great plan originally. They had a bunch of things they were going to do, and then, because of time pressures– due to a number of different factors– they ended up saying: ‘we’ll do these exceptions.’”

Harbridge went on to explain that an example of an exception would be turning on external sharing temporarily and skipping permission mapping for a subset of data. In this story, the parties involved had a set of content for which they didn’t do the label mapping. The mistake, Harbridge said, wasn’t that these things happened; it’s that they didn’t track them. 

“So, the team was well aware of these risks and that they knew they had to address them, but they didn’t really do a good best practice to create what we call an exception registry,” said Harbridge.

By implementing an exception registry, you have owners who can review an exception and decide whether to revisit or validate it.

Suppose these best practices aren’t implemented and exceptions aren’t readdressed. In that case, trust can break down because, in the case of this example, after just two months, some sensitive documents were leaked to an external audience through an AI solution. 

“That remediation took many sprints and trust suffered,” said Harbridge. “It wasn’t that there were some people that knew that they’d done these actions. It’s just because of the fatigue– people were so busy they didn’t have a place to store it and they didn’t have a way to create that visibility. Because of that, it just wasn’t prioritized the way it would have been otherwise from an investment perspective.”

In some cases, Harbridge mentions, someone knows an exception exists, but they don’t know who to ask to make the final decision on whether they can close or fix it.   

“Having that owner is something you should do in every migration,” Harbridge reiterates.

Cultural challenges to not addressing migration fatigue

There are both operational and cultural challenges with migrations and consolidations. ShareGate delivers migrations as if they are a core competency or product, considering them in a product management sense.

“On the cultural side, I think we have a few complications. One, the best migrations are actually co-owned by business and IT. That’s challenging because the second business starts to co-own it, the downside is that now scope creep is natural, right? The business wants to both optimize and migrate,” Harbridge said. “The cultural dynamic here that’s important is that the business needs to understand when we are delivering this migration and consolidation as a service in the organization.”

There are some components that the business will be more responsible for, such as how optimization activities work with IT support, while there are also aspects for which IT is responsible.

What advice would Harbridge give?

Some executives see migration as a cost center rather than a long-term enabler of growth. Harbridge says that while migration is generally about cost-cutting, it’s the wrong way to think about it.

“Historically, that’s kind of what we looked at it for. We’re consolidating, so we don’t need two systems of the same,” Harbridge said, adding that organizations need to think about all the other reasons to migrate: the increasing security threats on legacy systems or end of support.

Further, it’s a little different in the AI era.

“In the AI era, consolidation is about creating conditions for safer and faster AI or Copilot innovation,” explained Harbridge. “In the Microsoft world, it’s reducing shadow AI risks directly– in the most direct way possible.”

Faster innovation is another reason executives should reconsider migration as purely a financial move. Many organizations are struggling with AI readiness and scaling AI in a safe, predictable, and responsible way.

Organizations struggle in this area because of the lack of investment in foundations like good governance, migration, and consolidation.

“Historically, they were cost-cutting, optimization activities. They were kind of like vitamins, but right now they’re headaches,” said Harbridge. “Now it’s Advil, because if you don’t do this, shadow AI is going to be a big problem, and you’re going to have risks and leaks and other things like that. If you don’t do this, you really are stymied and unable to scale.”

IT shifting should be more proactive than reactive. In the AI era, IT teams must support the business and drive rapid innovation, requiring them to be more proactive and engaged with the business than ever before.

Where ShareGate comes in

ShareGate helps organizations with migration, utilizing tools within a fixed price, one license, and no data cap.

Organizations can pay for ShareGate for multiple years to finish their work and worry about whether there’s an aspect of their environments that they did not consider.

With its suite of tools, ShareGate can assist with an IT migration project by helping with varioius tasks, including:

• Project planning and risk reduction
• Preserving data integrity and permissions 
• Minimizing business disruption
• Simplifying complex or hybrid environments 
• Governance and post-move cleaning
• Supporting stakeholder communications and compliance

Nowadays, database migrations often miss deadlines, taking longer than initially expected. Read more about recent Caylent research, which focuses on database migrations and how to leverage AI to support clients.