Exchange to Office 365 Migration: A Hybrid to Cloud Setup

07 December 2022

The Client

The client is a key player in the Financial Services Industry, a reputed investment advisor, headquartered in San Francisco, California with multiple offices stretched across New York, Fort Lauderdale, Chicago, and London. With over 20 lending products and specialization in secured loans, the client provides tailored financial solutions to its customers.

The Need

The client had a partially migrated hybrid Office 365 environment and was looking to migrate Exchange 2013 to Office 365 – a completely cloud-based setup. The client needed a strong Microsoft Partner who could help them with the pending mailbox migration from Exchange 2013 to Office 365 and sync with the new AD tenant with the help of which the Azure AD could be associated via the AAD Connect.

The client approached Star Knowledge’s experienced Microsoft 365 consultants with their migration challenges. The Office 365 migration required us to perform the following:

• Migrating 350+ On-premises mailboxes to Office 365
• Active Directory migration – Migrating security group and distribution group to the new Active directory
• Configuring new 2019 exchange server as a relay server for their email reports
• Setting up DR for the exchange server for high availability and failover for the Exchange server 2020
• Ensuring security patching and office 365 security review and remediation

The scope concluded with the assessment of their office 365 tenant, compliance and any security issues as required to resolve any security and compliance issues on their tenant.

The Challenge

The assessment of the client’s existing Office 365 environment opened several other challenges:

• Barracuda spam filter needed to be configured as the first level of spam control for office 365 and exchange 2019
• Migrating the user profiles from one tenant to the other AD tenant without breaking the user mail flow
• Migrating the user profiles from older AD to the new AD tenant and then syncing and mapping all user identities on the cloud
• Setup DR testing and failover as required
• User support and adoption as the client was based across several geographies

The Solution

As a preferred Microsoft Gold Partner with 10 years of experience in providing Microsoft Solutions, Star Knowledge has been a standard of excellence in Office 365 consulting services. With a rank earned among the top 10 most promising cloud migration solution providers, our team of Office 365 consultants have demonstrated extraordinary competence in cloud migrations.

Here’s how our Office 365 migration specialists executed the migration as against the challenges posed by the project:

• Migration of pending mailboxes from Exchange 2013 to Office 365
• User profiles migration and synced them with the new AD domain
• Barracuda Spam Filter configuration
• Exchange relay server and the spam filter bypass setup
• Disaster recovery and failover configuration for their exchange server on a different data center via Azure
• Conducted security assessment for threat protection, sharing policies, mail flow protection, spam filter setup, trust Centre score resolution, information classification and protection

Following the migration, Star Knowledge setup Exchange 2019 on Azure to act as their smtp relay server within their domain to integrate with wireless printers, connect with their applications etc. and this required a complete replica setup on Azure AD site recovery in case there are failures on the current data center.

Benefits 

1. Minimal enterprise downtime during the Active Directory (AD) migration from the old domain to the new domain
2. Automated DR and HA site for exchange relay server
3. Multi-level tenant protection with spam filter and policy setup
4. Improved security of the tenant and reduced security risk

Technology

• Microsoft 365
• Microsoft Azure Cloud
• Azure Active Directory
• Barracuda
• Exchange 2013
• Exchange 2019
• Site Replication
• Toshiba Copier
• On-prem AD server 2016

Have a similar migration requirement? Get in touch with us for unparalleled Office 365 migration services. Whether you want to migrate Exchange 2013 to Office 365 or migrate any other Exchange server (on-premises) set up to the cloud, our migration specialists can help.