What is Exchange to Office 365 migration?
Exchange to Office 365 migration, also known as email or mailbox migration, describes the process of moving (migrating) your organization’s email data and associated resources, such as your contacts and calendar data, from an on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server to the cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 environment.
How to migrate to Office 365 from Exchange with confidence
Migrating from Exchange to Office 365 is a multi-stage effort that requires careful planning, execution, and validation. A structured approach protects email data and maintains security controls throughout the transition, whether you are moving from a legacy on-premises environment or a hosted Exchange platform.
Step 1: Assess Your Environment and Define the Migration Scope
Start by evaluating your existing email environment, including mailbox sizes, user count, Exchange version, and dependencies such as archiving or journaling. This assessment determines whether you need to migrate a single Exchange mailbox, multiple databases, or an entire organization. It informs the overall migration method best suited to your infrastructure.
Step 2: Select the Appropriate Migration Approach
Choose a migration approach based on business size, risk tolerance, and timeline. Options typically include cutover, staged, or hybrid migrations, each offering different levels of coexistence between on-premises systems and Microsoft 365. Organizations running live Exchange environments often favor staged or hybrid approaches to reduce disruption while users transition in phases.
Step 3: Prepare Microsoft 365 and Connectivity
Before moving data, configure your Microsoft 365 tenant and verify connectivity between environments. This includes:
- Validating permissions
- Enabling required services
- Confirming availability of Exchange Web Services connectivity
Doing so helps confirm support for mailbox movement, calendar access, and directory synchronization during the transition. You’ll also need a plan to protect email data from loss and corruption as you migrate mailboxes, or you’ll risk losing valuable information and intelligence in the move. Since migrations may involve downtime, you'll need a plan to accomplish the migration as quickly and unobtrusively as possible.
Step 4: Execute Mailbox and Data Migration
With prerequisites in place, begin transferring data using a validated 365 migration tool that supports mailbox content, calendars, contacts, and metadata. During this stage, actively monitor the migration process to ensure data integrity, track progress, and resolve errors before proceeding to additional batches or users.
Step 5: Update DNS and Switch Mail Flow
Once mailboxes are synchronized and users are ready, update DNS records to route email delivery to Microsoft 365. This cutover finalizes the move and ensures inbound and outbound mail flows correctly while minimizing disruption to end users.
Step 6: Decommission Legacy Exchange Infrastructure
After confirming successful delivery, access, and user validation, you can safely migrate Exchange server workloads out of production. Decommissioning legacy infrastructure reduces attack surface, simplifies management, and prevents outdated systems from becoming security liabilities.
Mimecast provides a suite of cloud-based services helping you migrate to Office 365 from exchange with confidence and without service disruptions. Mimecast's best-of-breed solutions ensure uninterrupted access to email services during migration, protect the integrity of email data and significantly reduce the time and data volume required to migrate mailboxes.
Migrate to Office 365 from Exchange with help from Mimecast
Mimecast's security, archiving and continuity cloud services protect business email and deliver comprehensive email risk management in one fully-integrated subscription service. Mimecast's all-in-one solution eliminates the need to deploy and manage disjointed point solutions – Mimecast services provide tools to manage every aspect of your email system more effectively. You also mitigate single-vendor exposure after you migrate to Office 365 from Exchange with Mimecast.
To help you migrate to Office 365 from Exchange more easily, Mimecast offers services for:
- Email archiving – Mimecast's secure and perpetual cloud archive provides an independent and verifiable backup of email data to protect against loss and corruption while migrating to Office 365. Mimecast's abilities for Microsoft Office 365 archiving include rapid search, access to email from any device, and comprehensive support for compliance, litigation and e-discovery needs.
- Email security – Mimecast offers protection against advanced threats, malware, viruses and spam before, during and after you migrate to Office 365 from Exchange.
- Email continuity – Mimecast automatically reroutes email to users during service outages and planned downtime, ensuring that users have access to live and historic email attachments while you migrate to Office 365 from Exchange.
A structured migration approach helps teams adopt Office 365 cloud email without introducing unnecessary downtime, data loss, or security gaps.
Execute your Exchange to Office 365 migration
Mimecast supports your Exchange migration to Office 365 with a cloud-based solution providing assurance you’ll have full access to current and archived email before, during and after the migration.
As you execute your Exchange migration to Office 365, Mimecast delivers:
- Email security services providing critical defenses against advanced threats like spear-phishing and zero-day attacks as well as spam, malware, and viruses.
- Data leak prevention with tools to scan outgoing email, blocking and quarantining suspect email for administrator review.
- Fast response to litigation and compliance requests with email archiving tools for searching your email storage and retrieving messages and attachments within seconds.
- Mailbox- level-compliant archiving for an independent, verifiable backup of email data that supports legal hold, e-discovery, and recovery.
- Access to email during outages and disasters. Mimecast Mailbox Continuity ensures your employees can send and receive email even when Office 365 is down.
- Instant access to legacy archives that may not be part of your Exchange migration to Office 365.
- Faster Exchange migration to Office 365 with cloud mailbox archiving and message routing.
What are the benefits of migrating from Exchange to Office 365 for cybersecurity?
There are numerous benefits of migrating from an on-premises Exchange server to Office 365, such as easier maintenance, better compliance, improved accessibility, and enhanced collaboration between employees., and Wwithout a doubt, there are benefits to cybersecurity as well.
- Enhanced Threat Protection - Office 365 applies continuously updated, cloud-based security controls that reduce exposure to emerging email and malware threats.
- Privacy Controls - Native privacy and data handling controls give administrators clearer oversight of how sensitive information is accessed and shared.
- Multifactor Authentication (MFA) - Built-in MFA adds an additional verification layer to user logins, significantly limiting the impact of compromised credentials.
- Information Governance - Centralized governance tools help enforce consistent data classification, retention, and protection policies across email and collaboration services.
Managing legacy data as you migrate to Office 365 from Exchange
Migrating legacy email archives to Office 365 can be time-consuming, costly and risky. Mimecast Legacy Archive Data Management for Office 365 provides a fast, safe and simple way to handle your historic email archives. Mimecast's high-speed historical email ingestion service enables you to quickly move legacy archive data to the Mimecast cloud, where it can be consolidated in a single cloud archive prior to Office 365 migration to reduce migration risk.
Learn more about how to migrate to Office 365 from Exchange with help from Mimecast, about Mimecast's Office 365 email archiving capabilities and about the advantages of Mimecast as a Postini replacement.
