How to Handle Microsoft 365 Migration Pitfalls
Learn how to get the most out of Microsoft 365 with our free ebook “Consolidating Cloud Services and Fully Leveraging Microsoft 365” today!
Read our other posts on cloud consolidation below:
- 5 Ways Microsoft 365 Streamlines Your Cloud Services
- Preparing for Microsoft 365: 3 Vital Steps
- The Increasing Problem of Cloud Services Sprawl
Cloud consolidation offers a long list of advantages, as we have explored earlier in this eBook. But as with anything in life, there are disadvantages too.
It would be unfair and one-sided to exclusively highlight the advantages of cloud consolidation, so in this post we’ll address the three most significant weakness of consolidating cloud services into Microsoft 365.
Heightened Impact of Outages
While it doesn’t happen frequently nor for an extended duration of time, any outages to Microsoft 365 results in irate customers airing their grievances on social media channels, and analysts positing that organizations will drop the service. The anger always cools fairly quickly, however.
Over the past several years, various outages have impacted Azure AD (for service-wide authentication), Exchange Online (for email), and Microsoft Teams (for collaboration and calling), but Microsoft has generally resolved the outages within 2-8 hours and posted the findings of its own detailed investigations and mitigation plan.
The frequency and duration of outages are much less than what organizations have historically experienced with on-premises approaches.
If it happened, a complete, extended, global shutdown of would have significant detrimental effects for organizations all-in on Microsoft 365 exclusively, but the likelihood of this is minuscule.
Organizations seeking to mitigate the risk of outages in Microsoft 365 can leverage AvePoint Cloud Backup to regularly back up key workloads to a storage location of the customer’s choice, and have data restoration options to local drives and other out-of-place locations.
Using AvePoint Cloud Backup enables critical work to continue even in the case of a service outage, and if the entire service was to ever fail completely and irrevocably, Cloud Backup customers would have their data available for migrating to a new on-premises or alternative cloud-based service.
Reduced Negotiating Power
Fewer vendors at the table means that organizations have lower negotiating power over pricing from key vendors. At the extreme, it becomes a “take-it-or-leave-it” proposition, which never makes for a pleasant meal.
Microsoft could take this approach, but so could any other vendor, and we have already seen examples of other cloud vendors raising prices while keeping the service offering unchanged.
Microsoft’s more common approach, based on their actions over the past several years, has been to add new features only in the higher-priced Microsoft 365 plans, and organizations using the lower-priced plans have the option to upgrade should they want to.
But in the final analysis, pricing for Microsoft 365 should be irrelevant. Your organization’s benefits realization strategy must be sufficiently robust to deliver tremendous value that far outweighs whatever cost is incurred in procuring Microsoft 365. If that’s not happening, there are far larger issues at play.
For one more must-know drawback of cloud consolidation, be sure to download the full ebook!
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As the former Content Marketing Specialist for AvePoint, Brent led the strategy and direction of all AvePoint's blog properties.
