Office 365 Readiness Assessment: Are you O365 Ready?

01 Apr 2020

So, you’ve finally made the good call to move to office 365 (now a part of Microsoft 365)? Welcome to the clan! But wait! Whether you’re planning to go all in on the cloud or planning a hybrid migration, there’s a little homework to do.

Before you even plan the move, it’s important to understand that office 365 migration is not simple. There are a lot of factors to be considered and looked into to ensure a successful office 365 implementation. And one of the most crucial considerations in your office 365 pre-migration checklist should be conducting a readiness assessment.

A successful office 365 deployment involves a thorough Office 365 readiness assessment which is designed to collect detailed information about the current state of your existing IT infrastructure and to learn whether it can handle all the great functionalities and features of Office 365.

Why is Office 365 Readiness Assessment So Important?

• Helps you evaluate the business, technology, processes, and people.
• The move to the cloud is complex and overlooking readiness assessment may favour a migration failure.
• Readiness assessment determines the best way forward, all changes involved and impacts on your business.
• Helps you build a cost model by determining what can be moved, what should be moved and what shouldn’t be migrated.
• Helps you determine if your technology group is ready for deploying and supporting office 365.
• Office 365 readiness assessment helps you gain insights on governance, compliance and security requirements.

Here’s What a Thorough Office 365 Readiness Assessment Involves:

Comprehensive readiness assessment services comprise a review of your network infrastructure, server, applications, and desktop. And there’s more to it:

• Review Infrastructure and Requirements

Office 365 readiness assessment should begin with a thorough assessment of your existing infrastructure which includes:

1. Reviewing the no. and details of client devices, operating systems, architectures, required languages, existing versions of Office, Project, and Office applications
2. Ensuring the client devices meet the minimum system requirements for Microsoft 365 Apps installation.
3. Reviewing the system requirements of office server workloads
4. Reviewing deployment tools in use.

• Licenses and Features

The next step involves the selection of office 365 features and the right license. Here you need to select the right license tiers, the higher you go the more you get. When it comes to office 365 feature selections, pick only those features that you’re ready to deploy and as your business scales, you can always introduce additional services or features.

• Active Directory Services

This involves ensuring your active directory environment is compatible with office 365 requirements. Here we need to ensure that Microsoft Active Directory (AD) has no issues and meets the supported levels with the current implementation to prevent any issues with Azure AD integration and Single Sign-On (SSO).

• Existing application compatibility

Did you know outdated infrastructure is one of the most common disruptions to a successful office 365 migration? That’s why we need a strong infrastructure readiness assessment.

The existing applications running on your IT need to be assessed for their compatibility to determine whether you can go for a complete cloud environment or a hybrid solution. Here we identify which workloads are compatible with office 365 and are ready to be migrated to the cloud.

• Client and End User Experience

When planning an office 365 migration, end-user and client requirements are highly important. Here we need to see if the desktops and laptops are office 365 ready. The goal behind this is to gain a clear understanding of the infrastructure and receive a clear action plan to help users experience the great office 365 environment as intended.

• Network

Network and firewall services are vital when connecting applications to the cloud. We need to determine DNS requirements, internet proxies, determine the impact of proxies, ensure firewall and ports are opened and forwarded appropriately, complete a change management process to ensure these don’t break the security protocol.

As the most preferred Microsoft Partner company, we provide comprehensive Office 365 migration services, from planning and design, to readiness assessment and migrations, to support and managed services. Our consultants take a pragmatic approach in delivering SaaS solutions that completely support the growth of your business.

• Capture information about your existing environment
• Assessment of your existing hardware and software infrastructure
• Identifying potential migration challenges
• Microsoft Active Directory integration
• Network, name services and connectivity planning
• User identity, access and provisioning planning
• Exchange online services planning
• Microsoft Teams Online services planning
• Office 365 services planning
• Identification of all Microsoft licenses required
• Analysis and validation of implementation timeline and organizational readiness