Johannesburg, 18 Jun 2015
Many larger organisations are examining the possibility of moving to software-as-a-service offerings like Microsoft's Office 365 in an effort to harness the benefits of cloud productivity and reduced licensing and service overheads, says Chris Hathaway, Founder & Director of Soarsoft International.
However, migrating the messaging and collaboration function online with Office 365 from onsite (Exchange, SharePoint & Lync) and other collaboration platforms can be challenging, and could cause costly disruptions and frustration to the business should the adoption preparation and migration be badly managed.
A hybrid environment, which simultaneously uses a combination of both cloud and on-premises services, is often a necessary stepping stone, and is becoming more and more popular to avoid the issues associated with a "Big Bang" approach. This is especially true for larger, more complex organisations. This can, however, be a double-edged sword if not properly planned, prepared, tested and then deployed.
Another key concern that organisations have with this transition, particularly those in heavily regulated industries, such as financial services or healthcare, is that of security, sovereignty and compliance. They require the peace of mind that comes from knowing that, during and after the transition, security or privacy legislation will not be breached in any way.
In addressing this, Microsoft has recently made great strides to update Office 365 from a compliance perspective by integrating a number of key innovations. They consider compliance to be a core feature of their services and, as such, continue to make significant investments to support compliance with specific standards and regulations related to data security and privacy as required by organisations in various geographies and industries.
Some of these most recent innovations in security, privacy and compliance within Microsoft's cloud offerings, presented at Ignite 2015, include the expansion of the eDiscovery Centre, more granular mobile device management capabilities, data loss prevention (DLP) and the identification of regular expressions that allow organisations to find and identify credit card, identity and other sensitive numeric data.
Added to these innovations, Microsoft also realises that organisations' people and data are their most important assets and, as such, they have introduced Microsoft Trust Centre as a forum for questions and comments specifically relating to trust and data security related topics.
Although Microsoft is doing their part in terms of ensuring compliance of their platforms, when it comes to organisations leveraging these platforms correctly, a trusted advisor can be an invaluable asset to ensure the organisation leverages all the available security and management facilities provided by the platform. In many instances the drive to cloud adoption could be based on the security and compliance features that Microsoft are deploying to their cloud platforms a lot faster than their onsite equivalents.
At Soarsoft International, we often need to optimise our customers' deployments, as they have not configured or even deployed many of the new and existing functions provided for the protection and compliance around information assets now residing in the cloud.
This is often due to the incredibly fast release cycle of these functions on the Microsoft cloud platforms, and is a significant factor during the transition period when organisations run in a hybrid mode. The hybrid mode of deployment allows for faster adoption and a controlled journey to the cloud in a staged and highly managed process.
Soarsoft International offers streamlined migration solutions with fast processing, flexible scheduling and reduced risk that enable organisations to migrate their environment while remaining productive and minimising the impact to users. These solutions and our expertise ensures that organisations have fully integrated tracking and reporting for adherence to compliance, chain of custody and eDiscovery criteria, amongst a number of other security and compliance benefits.
Migrating to Office 365 Exchange Online in a hybrid environment can assist organisations to leverage the best of both environments, however, the solution needs to be deployed correctly in order to provide the seamless transition, right functionality required, and complete compliance and security adherence.
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