What Makes Migrating to the Cloud Different Than On-Premises

What Makes Migrating to the
Cloud Different than On-Premises?
CHRISTIAN BUCKLEY
CHIEF EVANGELIST @METALOGIX

Christian Buckley
Chief Evangelist & SharePoint MVP
Metalogix
www.buckleyplanet.com
@buckleyplanet
cbuck@metalogix.com

For over a decade, Metalogix has developed the
industry’s best and most trusted management
tools for SharePoint, Exchange, and Office 365,
backed by our live 24x7 support.
Over 14,000 clients rely on Metalogix tools every
minute of every day to monitor, migrate, store,
synchronize, archive, secure, and backup their
collaboration platforms.
We are committed to your
Success with SharePoint!

What Makes Migrating to the Cloud
Different than On-Premises?
 What I’ll cover today:
• The inevitable move toward the cloud?
• Common migration scenarios
• SharePoint Online limitations and
current migration performance issues
• Planning best practices

We’re moving from these
“systems of record” to a more
social, collaborative “systems of
engagement” model
~ John Mancini, CEO of AIIM.org

SharePoint 2013
was a pivotal
release

• As SharePoint continues to expand its footprint,
companies are demanding flexible
architectures to help them better meet internal
and external collaboration needs
• Reducing costs
• Reducing headcount
• Doing more with less
• Focusing less on traditional IT activities and more on
activities that will help drive the business forward
Why are we talking about Cloud?

Alternatives for control,
cost, & capability

Infrastructure
maintained
solely for
customer
On premises or
off
Managed by the
customer, or by
a 3rd party
hoster
Private Cloud Hybrid Cloud
Multiple
infrastructure
options
Components
both on premises
and off premises
Management
spread between
customer and 3rd
party hosters
Infrastructure
shared by
multiple
customers
Off premises
Managed by 3rd
party on behalf
of customers
Public Cloud

4 workloads in one platform
 SharePoint
 Exchange
 Yammer
 OneDrive for Business

Partner Hosted
Private Cloud
• Dedicated environment
• Externally hosted
• Externally or internally
managed
• Internally designed
Self Hosted
Private Cloud
• Dedicated environment
• Internally hosted
• Internally managed
• Internally designed
Shared or Dedicated
Public Cloud
• Shared or dedicated
environment
• Externally managed
• Externally designed
Dedicated
Public Cloud
• Partially or fully dedicated
• Externally or internally
managed
• Minimal customization
Traditional
on prem
Answering “Build vs Buy”

Common Scenarios
 Rapid provisioning of new workloads on Office 365 while
maintaining existing on-premises workloads
 Organizations wishing to migrate existing workloads from
an on-premises environment to the cloud over time in a
phased approach
 Organizations wanting to supplement their cloud
environment with additional features or customizations
which are currently only possible on-premises
 Compliance or data sovereignty reasons which might
stipulate certain data be hosted in a particular location
Hybrid SharePoint Environments with Office 365, Microsoft

Common solutions for the Cloud
On Premises Cloud
AD
Azure
ADADFS

Moving to the Cloud on your terms

Advantages of SPO
 No need to plan for
 Scalability
 Licensing
 Disaster recovery
 Business continuity
 Ongoing maintenance and upgrades
 No need to migrate to a future version
Plan a Large Scale Migration to SharePoint Online (SlideShare) by Erica Toelle

What about my existing
investment in SharePoint?
 Most SharePoint deployments have included
customizations to meet critical business needs
 User Management & Administration
 Security and Compliance
 Auditing, Reporting, Alerting
 User Adoption, Records
 Branding, etc…
 Consider the business
problems you’ve
already invested
in solving

Is there risk in
moving my data
to the cloud?

Planning
 SPO is not an apple to apple move
 Understand what you are trying to accomplish before
you disrupt and attempt to move systems
Vs.

Migration Methodology
Methodology used internally at Microsoft
Plan a Large Scale Migration to SharePoint Online (SlideShare) by Erica Toelle

Understand what can and
should be moved to the clou

What are you planning to move?

Create a SharePoint Inventory
URLs
Site Collection Name
Site Collection Size
Sub site count
Large Lists
Document Versions
Customizations
Site Location/position
Content DB – Size, Number
Site Collections per DB
Duplicate or Orphaned Site Collections
My Sites – Content DB, Size
SharePoint 2013 Thresholds and Limits
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/cc262787.aspx

Run a “health assessment”
 Inventory your system and data
 3rd party tools
 Workflows
 Customizations
 Custom branding
 Versions
 LOB app integrations and other data connections
 Topology
 Site usage metrics
 Reporting

Prioritize your plans
 Determine which sites, site collections, and solutions
should be moved first
 Organize your information architecture, map the old
system to the new
 Select test sites, use UAT to refine your plans
 Determine the right migration approach for each site
and site collection
 Manual
 Scripted
 3rd party tool
 Assisted (partner or Microsoft)

Develop an Information Architecture (IA)
Evaluate current business
process
Consider existing site
structures
Departmental/team
reorganization
Publishing requirements
Search/findability
Navigation
Content Growth
“Over half feel they would be 50%
more productive with enhanced
workflow, search, information
reporting, and automated document
creation tools” 1
1 – The SharePoint Puzzle – adding the missing pieces, AIIM, 2012

Know your limits
 Migrations to SharePoint Online (SPO) have some
significant limitations when compared to migrations from
on-premises environments to on-prem, or to dedicated
offerings such as Office 365-D (Microsoft’s dedicated
service), Azure, AWS, Rackspace and other environments.
 These limitations have a significant impact not only on
what is possible with migrations of on-premises SharePoint
and other content to SPO, but also on performance of
migrations to SPO.
 Microsoft continues to expand these APIs, and it is likely
that many but not all of these limitations will be removed
over time

SPO Limitations
Limitation Impact
Limited APIs. Migrations to on-premises
and private cloud (e.g.
Azure/Amazon/O365-D)
implementations of SharePoint support
the use of the full SharePoint Server
Object Model, the richest API available
for SharePoint, or a thin web services
layer that exposes the SharePoint Server
Object Model (Metalogix Extensions
Web Services/MEWS), for both reading,
and writing SharePoint Content.
Due to the multi-tenant nature of SPO,
Microsoft cannot expose the full
SharePoint Object Model in SPO.
Limited automation and controls around
migration and provisioning.
Microsoft currently expose three,
relatively limited API’s that are useful for
migrations:
• The Client Side Object Model
(CSOM)
• The Native Web Services (NWS) API
• The REST based interfaces to the
CSOM

SPO Limitations
Limitation Impact
Inability to connect at the
Farm/Tenant level (CSOM) - With
the full SharePoint Object Model or
MEWS, users can connect at the
Web Application or Farm level.
With the CSOM adapter users
cannot connect at the closest
equivalent, which is the Tenant
level
• Users have to create Site
Collections in the SPO admin
page prior to connecting to
them.
• Using 3rd party migration tools,
users may have to create a
separate connection for each
Site collection in SPO. Users are
unable to browse/search for all
root level Site Collections, and
may require more steps to
promote Sites to Site
Collections.

SPO Limitations
Limitation Impact
Inability to preserve Item IDs in lists • Lists with dependencies on
other lists such as Lookup
columns rely on Item IDs in the
Lookup lists.
• Because the CSOM does not
support retaining the Item ID of
list items, some 3rd party tools
have created workarounds that
may impact performance.

SPO Limitations
Limitation Impact
Copying MySites can only be done
one MySite at a time, and does not
include User Profile information.
• Unlike on-prem to on-prem
migrations where MySites can
be moved in a single operation,
in SPO admins must first create
each MySite.
• Admins then need to connect
to each MySite Site Collection
separatey, and then copy the
content from the source,
pasting it into the target MySite.
• Admins cannot copy MySite
profile information.

SPO Limitations
Limitation Impact
Versioning limitations in the CSOM
API.
• No support for migration of
minor versions of documents
• Authorship information for
rejected versions in a
document library with approval
is lost.

SPO Limitations
Limitation Impact
Nintex workflows cannot yet be
migrated to Office 365 due to
these same CSOM limitations.
Nintex workflows must be
recreated using the Nintex SPO
offering to the best extent as
possible.

SPO Limitations
Limitation Impact
Most on premises 3rd party solutions
are either not available in SPO, or
their functionality is greatly
reduced
Work with vendor to understand
product roadmap and capabilities.
Other options are to build using out
of the box capability.

SPO Limitations
Limitation Impact
Inability to troubleshoot issues Required to work through Microsoft
support and SLAs. Retrieving a
correlation ID for a error could take
days/weeks

SPO Performance
 SPO is on the open internet, and is a multi-tenant
environment.
 Microsoft utilizes a number of methods to protect SPO
customer environments and the integrity of these server
farms.
 Based on performance benchmarking by SharePoint ISV
Metalogix, there is an impact of between 40% and 45% on
the performance of migrations to SPO because of some of
these necessary protection mechanisms.

SPO Performance
Mechanism Impact
User and Tenant-based throttling,
which ensures that no single user or
tenant can perform so many
simultaneous operations that it
would cause performance issues
for other tenants*
Large or complex migration jobs
can be cut off mid-migration.
*For more information, see HTTP Request Throttling in
SharePoint 2010 which still applies to 2013.

SPO Performance
Mechanism Impact
Farm-based throttling. If a SPO farm
becomes unhealthy due to
extreme levels of activity, Microsoft
may throttle migrations to SPO and
not permit them to continue until
farm health returns to normal.
Any migration job can be throttle
at any time of day (usually during
peak time. This makes migration
performance extremely
unpredictable, and variable based
on time of day, day of week, and
other variables out of your control.

SPO Performance
Mechanism Impact
Virus scanning SPO requires stringent virus
scanning to ensure all tenants on
the shared farm are protected, but
it slows down migrations as each
document migrated must be
scanned.

SPO Performance
Mechanism Impact
Hardware-based load balancing
determines which Web Front End
(WFE) server in the farm to route
incoming traffic, based on how
busy any given WFE is at that time
This can slow down migrations that
are large (content) or complex
(many items with multiple
metadata fields, and/or many
versions)

SPO Performance
Mechanism Impact
Third-party commercial denial of
service monitoring platform for
monitoring and throttling
capabilities*
versions)
*See The Office 365 Trust Center for more information.

SPO Performance
Mechanism Impact
Third-party commercial denial of
service monitoring platform for
monitoring and throttling
capabilities*
versions)

SPO Performance
 Microsoft is working on figuring out workarounds that could
potentially allow migration vendors to improve the
performance of migrations when clients using those vendors
indicate that they are in the process of migrating to SPO.
 Metalogix internal benchmarking and data from customers
has shown that for SPO migrations with a single machine
averaged between 200MB and 550MB/hour depending on the
workload, the time of day, how busy the farm is, and numerous
other factors that are outside of our control.

SPO Performance
 Disabling the ‘Following Content’ site feature (not site
collections) can improve migration performance:
 This feature is enabled by default when a new site is created.
When it is disabled, performance of Site copies improves by
approximately 20% to 25% for document-heavy workloads.

SPO Performance
 Due to the migration performance, it is recommended
that you take a gradual migration approach
 May involve migrating one division at a time, and going
live with that division.
 Allows you to assess the impact on your business users
and your helpdesk after moving one group of people to
a new user interface.
 Also allows you to use focus groups to determine which
features you would like to implement as you gradually
migrate the business to SPO.

SPO Hybrid Considerations
• Size and geographical distribution of an organization can
affect cloud adoption.
• Regulatory compliance and governance requirements
can limit cloud options.
• Service-level agreements (SLAs) may limit cloud options.
• It is important to understand the ROI of any proposed
solution (and the cost of change).
• Hybrid may be more of a transitional environment from on
prem to the cloud.
http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2014/02/office-365-sharepoint-hybrid-what-you-do-and-do-not-get.html

Factors in your cloud planning
 Location / facilities
 Software licenses and support
 Hardware and maintenance
 Onsite support, personnel skills
 Level of customization
 Governance, auditing, security, compliance
 Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
 Upgrades and migration

Focusing on the end user experienceFocusing on the end user experience

Things to consider:
 Be clear on your system constraints
 Understand and prioritize your key use cases
 Determine what should be local, what can
be in the cloud, what should be available
via mobile devices
 Constantly review and take action on what
can be automated and optimized

Resources
• Plan a Large Scale Migration to SharePoint Online (SlideShare) by Erica Toelle
http://www.slideshare.net/ericatoelle/plan-a-large-scale-migration-to-h
• Top 8 Migration Tips for Office 365 http://news.dice.com/2012/05/08/office-365-migration-tips/
• SharePoint On-Premises Or In The Cloud? Why not both? (John Ross) http://bit.ly/1pl2UOY
• Office 365 and Hybrid Solutions (Scott Hoag and Dan Usher) http://slidesha.re/1r6oIeP
• Your SharePoint Path Forward: On Prem, Cloud, or Hybrid http://bit.ly/1or8ngE
• SharePoint 2013 Thresholds and Limits (TechNet) http://bit.ly/QC7mK1
• Free Migration Planning Tool www.metalogix.com/products/Migration-Expert.aspx
• Pre-migration Analysis & Preparation www.metalogix.com/products/ControlPoint.aspx
• Plan for SharePoint 2013 (TechNet) http://bit.ly/VTcuuY
• Demystifying OneDrive for Business http://bit.ly/1rCyYPR
• Migrate Cloud Files to SharePoint Online & OneDrive for Business (free tool)
http://www.metalogix.com/Products/Drive2Office365.aspx
• Yes, You Can Move Straight From SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2013 http://bit.ly/1lyyg3L

Thank you!
www.buckleyplanet.com
@buckleyplanet
cbuck@metalogix.com

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