Chris
Written on 3rd June 2020

Over the last 12 months, we have assisted many of our clients in their migration from a traditional hosted mail appliance to Microsoft 365 (formally Office365).

What is Microsoft 365?

Microsoft 365 is Microsoft’s cloud offering of their popular office suite and hosted email and comes as a variety of packages.

Exchange Online

This option includes email only with either a 50GB or 100GB limit, allowing you to store thousands of emails. You can access your email through outlook.com, your desktop using Outlook, or mobile device such as iPhone, Android, iPad etc.

Microsoft 365 Business

This option includes your hosted email as well as office applications including Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Microsoft Teams. Depending on the packages you can use the applications through your web browser and/or the desktop equivalent. Packages can also include cloud storage for your files through OneDrive that will allow you and your team to access files from anywhere with an Internet connection.

What else do I need to know?

Backups – Microsoft do not back-up your data. Whilst your data will be replicated across multiple sites to provide redundancy, once you delete something it is gone for ever. Every business should consider how they backup their 365 data for peace of mind and for compliance purposes.

Spam protection – Microsoft provide basic “anti-malware” and “anti-spam” protection for your email. For businesses this usually doesn’t go far enough and additional spam protection is required.

Internet connection – We are increasingly becoming more reliant on our Internet connection, as all of your data will be hosted in the cloud you will need an Internet connection to access it.

Migration – you’ll likely want to retain your existing emails, calendars, reminders and files. This can be a complicated process with many pitfalls.