Tenant-to-Tenant Migration of Microsoft-Powered Environment with Zero Downtime
About Our Client
Our Client is an air freight carrier from Saudi Arabia.
The Client used to host its customer portal and Dynamics 365 CRM on a shared Microsoft Azure tenant with a partner company (both being subsidiaries of the same parent company). This shared arrangement suited both companies until the parent company initiated a restructuring program. As a result, the partner companies developed more independence from both the parent company and each other. Consequently, our Client chose to migrate its CRM and customer portal to a separate tenant, ensuring the isolation of its operations and data from the former co-tenant.
Migrating the Environment to a Different Tenant
For the project, ScienceSoft put together a team of a project manager, a business analyst, two Dynamics 365 developers, a Microsoft Azure administrator, and a testing engineer.
Preparation
In two weeks, ScienceSoft’s team calculated the storage capacity required for the new Azure tenant. We considered the storage volume of the current Client’s environment and factored in extra capacity based on the company’s historical storage consumption for the last three years. This calculation ensured the new tenant would meet the Client’s scaling needs.
Solution migration
The Client’s Dynamics 365 CRM and customer portal had both out-of-the-box and custom parts, which ScienceSoft migrated separately. As the Client didn’t plan any changes to its solutions, we used a lift-and-shift approach to migrate out-of-the-box parts of the solutions with the help of automated tools. This approach ensured a fast and less labor-intensive start of the migration process. Then, we manually transferred the custom code to replicate business-specific functionality built individually for the Client.
It took just 8 weeks to migrate the solutions and validate the migration’s quality.
Data migration
The Client didn’t experience any operational disruptions due to smoothly organized data migration. When we only started preparing the solutions for the migration, we sealed historical data and transferred it fully to a new tenant. During the 12 weeks the migration project was rolling, the Client’s team continued using the old tenant and naturally generated new data. When we switched the tenants, we migrated only this newly generated data, which was fast and painless for the Client’s processes.
Migration Results
In 12 weeks, the Client got its CRM and customer portal migrated to a new Microsoft tenant with no disruptions to its processes. The move to its own tenant allowed the Client to isolate its operations and business data, which was one of the steps to gaining autonomy following the strategic restructuring of the parent company.
