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.