Migrating Tradelink to Office 365

Tradelink had recently made the decision to outsource their IT department and also wanted to review their IT systems, which were no longer fit for purpose, having been last reviewed almost 10 years prior! BCN was tasked to conduct an audit and prepare a technology road map. After auditing the network, BCN were faced with the challenge of migrating antiquated systems for which support had reached end of life.

The company’s email system had been identified as a critical business service that needed upgrading first. Tradelink had been running their email on an on-premise Microsoft Exchange email server. This had been in place since it was installed back in 2010. Given that the hardware was dated and the business did not want to invest in new hardware, BCN had to find an alternative solution. Because multiple essential software updates had been missed, if the company were to skip directly to the latest versions, compatibility issues would arise.

On-premise Exchange email server migration to Microsoft 365 Solution

Tradelink had grown into a global business with offices located across five continents and, as such, the company wanted a system that was centrally hosted and easily accessible from all locations, from any device, at all times. Because the company operated with Microsoft and were keen on minimising the impact to the business from an end-user operability perspective it was proposed that BCN would migrate their email services over to Microsoft 365.

The project was especially challenging because BCN was not only upgrading the backend infrastructure but also the mail clients and, given the geographical spread of the customer across multiple times zones, continents and languages, this made the task even more challenging. Through careful planning and methodical execution, BCN successfully migrated the staff, their email accounts and associates’ data to the new platform with very little disruption and down-time.