Merger & Acquisition Madness?

Could M&A activity drive email record migrations out of Office 365?

Yesterday we received a query relating to a customer that wanted to migrate content from Office 365 into Enterprise Vault on premises.

Unusual direction, I thought.  After all, isn’t the corporate world moving into the cloud?

After a little digging, it turns out this request was as a result of a company takeover, where the new parent company (still based on premises), needed to quickly take responsibility of on-hold records in the acquiree’s Office 365 tenant for legal reasons.

Given that the two companies were operating in separate domains, a standard mailbox move request from Office 365 back down to Exchange was a non-starter.

The good news is that we were able to deliver a solution that would migrate the data exactly as required, and with all the due diligence you would demand when working with a physical move of sensitive records.  This includes:

• Detailed auditing (proof) of what’s been moved
• Zero opportunity for tampering or spoliation (thanks to one-step, in memory migration, direct from Office 365 to Enterprise Vault)
• Ability to gather and migrate items in hidden (RIF) Office 365 folders
• Extremely fast

These features are all vital when it comes to proving the completeness and reliability of any evidence produced in court – and speed is always of the essence when preparing for a court case.

Speed is of the essence with post-takeover integrations

In the fullness of time, the acquiring company may well migrate to Office 365, however, the nature of mergers and acquisitions is such that confidentiality is crucial in the run-up to the event.  This usually means the IT department is robbed of the benefit of early consolidation planning.

After the event, the secret to success lies in the early planning and timely execution of integration tasks.  As such, there’s a need for quick, ‘point’ solutions to high-priority business data challenges.

In this case, the ability to rapidly prepare to meet ongoing legal obligations and respond to any litigation requests were vital, even though, on paper, the technical merit of moving data back on-premises may be questionable.