Bits & Bytes

The BitTitan Blog for Service Providers

06/11/2021
Phil Herold
contentcluster_t2t_sizing

MSP Alert: The Rise in Tenant-to-Tenant Migrations for Microsoft 365

Over the last three years, there has been a sharp uptick in migrations between Microsoft 365 tenants. Otherwise known as tenant-to-tenant or T2T migrations, these scenarios have become more widespread as Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) has largely supplanted on-premises Exchange servers and file storage. With a large portion of Exchange-to-M365 migrations now complete, business-savvy MSPs are replacing the declining revenue of those engagements with new T2T projects.

We look deeper into how MSPs can evaluate their individual opportunities in a companion article, Sizing It Up: The Tenant-to-Tenant Migration Opportunity for MSPs. But first, consider the various forces that are driving the sheer number of these migrations overall.

T2T Migration Drivers

Market saturation of Microsoft 365. Microsoft’s cloud productivity suite has more than 250 million paid seats and is used by more than a million businesses worldwide. More people using these applications lead to an increased likelihood of migrations between tenants.

Mergers, acquisitions and divestitures. When companies restructure by merging operations or spinning off subsidiaries, their cloud operations need to be moved to another instance. While there was a drop in activity during 2020, the overall trend is still at a historical high. Three of the past five years were among the most active on record.

Trends in specific industries. Institutions of higher education are recognizing that maintaining separate tenants is a barrier to collaboration; therefore department-, school- or campus-specific tenants are being eliminated in favor of a single tenant organization-wide. Government institutions are moving from their public-cloud instances of Microsoft 365 to the Microsoft Government Community Cloud (GCC) or the GCC High option for security purposes.

Opportunities for MSPs

T2T migrations have their own challenges, but also offer excellent business opportunities for MSPs. When you can market a highly efficient migration capability that successfully moves all the mailboxes, documents and archives with high fidelity, you have a recipe for a moneymaker that leads to repeat business. We explore this more in Tenant to Tenant Migration Tools: Why Third-Party Solutions? And, for a compendium of very specific tips that you can put to use in your T2T migrations, see Tenant to Tenant Migrations: A Best-Practices Primer for MSPs.

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