Why migrate to Office 365?

Top 10 reasons to migrate to Office 365

Here in the first of our series of Office 365 blogs we outline the top 10 reasons for enterprises of all sizes to migrate to Microsoft’s state of the art Office 365 enterprise IT environment in 2017.

Office 365 has a wealth of enterprise rich features, such as, Skype for business, Power BI, Delve, Sway, Dynamics CRM Online and Yammer. But if these features are not enough to convince enterprises to migrate to the cloud, then the following features certainly will.

New UK Data Centres

On 1^st December 2016 Microsoft opened its first UK data centres. This now means that organisations with specific compliancy requirements for UK only data centres can now fulfil their obligations. Organisations who have already migrated to Office 365 also now have the ability to migrate to the new UK data centres.

Scalability

Historically enterprises have had to anticipate future growth and acquire infrastructure that will be able to accommodate this growth, often at a high cost and in some cases outdated before it can be utilised. With Microsoft’s cloud platform, enterprises of all sizes can now utilise the economies of scale of Office 365. The versatility and flexibility of the Microsoft cloud makes it commercially viable for enterprises who anticipate rapid growth, whilst at the same time only charging business for what they need and use.

World Class Security

Office 365 offers an enhanced security & compliance centre. Enterprises can manage archive mailboxes, eDiscovery cases, auditing reports, and retention and deletion policies, read more.

Other security measures include:

• Exchange online protection
• Data loss prevention
• Azure Rights management
• Encryption
• Information Rights management
• Mobile Device management
• Multi-layers of physical and virtual security which have been put in place at Microsoft’s datacentres around the globe, as well ISO 27001 and HIPS

Resiliency & DR

You would expect enterprise class resiliency from an enterprise class cloud solution and that is exactly what you get from the Microsoft cloud.  Office 365 recovers quickly from hardware or application failure, data corruption, or other incidents that could affect your enterprise users. Office 365 is hosted across multiple data centres and offers exceptional speed, agility and complete disaster recovery should there be a catastrophic incident.

No hardware & maintenance costs

CIOs, IT Directors and IT Managers are constantly faced with CapEx requirements for IT infrastructure renewals and IT platform uplifts. Office 365 removes the constant struggle to find these budgets as Office 365 covers all the upgrades and maintenance needed and provides clear visibility on OpEx going forward into the new reporting period. When you consider the cost of managing and maintaining a solution in-house, not to mention SharePoint, Office apps and anywhere, anytime access and availability, it becomes clear that Office 365 is now the preferred choice for enterprises and clearly leads the way forward for a cloud based IT solution.

Access anywhere, anytime & on any device

Use native apps or web based portals to work anywhere and on any device, with branded business class Mail, SharePoint, Office, Azure, LOB apps and a whole host of enterprise class solutions in Office 365. Migrations work with scheduled sync on virtually all devices and the cutover from on-premise to exchange online is virtually seamless.

Full integration with Office 365 web apps

Collaboration is easy with Office 365. Skype for Business allows sharing screens, audio/visual calls, conference calls, presenting and all of this is facilitated with Microsoft infrastructure. SharePoint Online allows co-authoring of documents and makes intranets more accessible to your users. Sharing and syncing files is easy with 1TB of data as standard and the ability to share with teams or anyone you choose. There is also Planner and Yammer which allow you to plan collaboratively and get social.

Exchange Online

Microsoft have included a generous 50GB standard mailbox feature making the online proposition extremely attractive. A financially backed service level agreement with a guaranteed 99.9% uptime, means email delivery that your business can count on.  There are also optional advanced features which can be purchased via the Enterprise Mobility Security Suite (EMS) and include advanced machine learning-based security.

SharePoint Online

An integral product within Office 365 and a truly seamless way to create portals and collaborative sites. It hosts easy to build templates and advanced form builders. Microsoft offers a fully managed solution with no maintenance, just full control for your organisations compliancy requirements and enterprise class support.

Hybrid solutions for complex IT environments

With hybrid deployments, enterprises have the ability to keep a seamless look and feel of a single Exchange organisation between an on-premises Exchange organisation and Exchange Online in Microsoft Office 365.  This functionality enables organisation with complex requirements that are not best suited to a cloud deployment to interact with seamless secure mail routing.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Acora is perfectly aligned to carry out complex Enterprise level migrations to Office 365. For a no obligation quotation on your Office 365 migration requirements, please call Acora on 020 3974 8812 or contact us here.

Please look out for further blogs in our Office 365 series throughout January.