Before you migrate to Microsoft 365 or Azure

Moving to Microsoft 365 or Azure is not just moving services. It also changes how access, licenses, backups, security, support and internal responsibilities are managed. When that base is unclear, the migration carries problems that later look like cloud failures, when they are really preparation failures.

This guide covers what to review before, during and after cutover, with a checklist at the end.

Identity first, not later

Many post-migration problems come from poorly organized accounts, inherited access, ungoverned users and inconsistent policies. Moving email, collaboration or infrastructure without reviewing identity carries the mess over to a more powerful platform.

Account inventory

Before migrating, build a table of every active user with their team, planned license and manager. Along the way you will almost always find:

• Accounts of people who no longer work for the organization.
• Shared mailboxes used with a common username and password.
• Service accounts (printers, scanners, applications) nobody documented.
• Too many admins, or admins using the same account for administration and daily work.

MFA and legacy authentication

In Microsoft Entra ID, security defaults require every user to register for MFA, ask admins for MFA at every sign-in and block legacy authentication. Microsoft recommends them for organizations getting started or on the free Entra ID tier; with P1 or P2 licenses, the right tool is Conditional Access.

Before turning them on, check what depends on older protocols: printers that send email over SMTP with a password, old mail clients or internal apps. If those are not sorted out first, they stop working on cutover day.

Emergency accounts

Microsoft recommends two cloud-only emergency access accounts with the Global Administrator role, not tied to a specific person and used only if every other admin is locked out. Create them, and document where their credentials are kept, before changing access policies.

The cloud does not replace operations

Azure and Microsoft 365 take care of a large part of infrastructure and collaboration, but they do not run your organization for you. Backups, monitoring, basic security, the user lifecycle, cost control and third-party relationships still need decisions and an owner.

Who does what after cutover

Task	Question to settle
Licenses	Who buys, assigns and removes licenses, with whose approval?
Onboarding and offboarding	Who creates and disables users, and how soon after someone leaves?
Backups	What is backed up, with what retention, and who tests the restore?
Costs	Who reviews Azure consumption each month, with which alert?
Security	Who reviews risky sign-ins and admin changes?
Escalation	Which incidents does the internal team solve and which go to the partner?

Backup and retention

Microsoft keeps its services available, but its Services Agreement recommends regularly backing up the content you store in them. Recycle bins have limits: a deleted SharePoint site, for example, is kept for 93 days and then permanently deleted.

So before migrating, decide what retention you need for regulatory or business reasons and how you will recover a mailbox, a OneDrive folder or a whole site. We cover this in access, backups and continuity, without guesswork.

Azure costs

In Azure, the bill depends on what is left running. Tagging resources by team or project from day one, setting budgets with alerts and reviewing consumption every month avoids surprises. A forgotten test virtual machine costs the same as a production one.

Plan the day after cutover

Many migrations are planned around the cutover weekend, not the first week of operation. That is when missing permissions, misconfigured mail profiles, automations that stopped running and people who cannot find their files show up.

Before cutover

• A pilot migration with a small, representative team.
• Communication to users: what changes, when and who to ask.
• An agreed change window and a list of checks to close the cutover.
• A defined rollback path, with the criteria that trigger it.

The first week

• Reinforced support and a single channel to report problems.
• Checks on critical data: complete mailboxes, shared folder permissions, calendars.
• A daily review of issues to spot patterns instead of fixing cases one by one.
• A formal close with the list of open items and their owners.

Common mistakes

• Migrating every account as is, including former employees’.
• Turning on MFA on cutover day, without registering users first.
• Assuming the cloud backs up everything.
• Not assigning anyone to review Azure costs each month.
• Closing the project on the Monday after cutover, without supporting the first week.

Checklist before you migrate

• Inventory of users, shared mailboxes and service accounts.
• Leftover accounts disabled and admins reduced to the minimum.
• A plan for MFA and for blocking legacy authentication, with dependencies resolved.
• Two emergency accounts created and documented.
• Owners for licenses, onboarding and offboarding, backups, costs and security.
• Retention and backup defined for email, OneDrive and SharePoint.
• Pilot, change window, checks and rollback path.
• Reinforced support for the first week.

Moving services to the cloud without deciding how they will be run afterwards is changing platforms, not maturing technologically. If you want to prepare the migration with support, this is how we work on cloud and infrastructure.