SharePoint Online migration, UK Government department

As part of a Machinery of Government (MoG) initiative, our team was responsible for transferring data between two separate SharePoint Online tenants within the UK government. This migration was necessary to support the reorganisation of departments resulting from the restructure.

This was a large-scale data migration of over 700 SharePoint sites and over 27 Terabytes of data, for scale that’s the equivalent of over 23.5 million copies of War and Peace!

Challenges

• All data required thorough analysis and reorganisation prior to migration due to the organisational restructure
• Ensuring no corruption or loss when moving epic amounts of data
• Preserving version history and metadata without vastly increasing storage needs and complexity
• Ensure that staff have read access to files during migration windows
• Ability to rollback without any end-user disruption
• Avoid data throttling from both government tenants

The Solution

• We supported the department’s Knowledge and Information Management (KIM) team with planning, analysis and data mapping
• We developed communication and mapping templates, delivered presentations, responded to user queries and guided data mapping decisions
• We delivered three end-user workshops every week to help users with the transition
• Scheduled and executed migrations using custom automation, tailored to the department’s requirements
• Parallel migrations using several high-powered ShareGate migration servers
• Pre- and post-migration reports to compare item counts, sizes and permissions

Outcomes And Benefits

• Content that is now owned by the department was successfully migrated to their SharePoint Online tenant without loss or corruption
• Correct users have access to the data they need on one secure platform
• Version control and metadata maintained
• No downtime experienced
• Migration completed ahead of schedule