Many organizations still manage email infrastructure themselves using local, on-premise equipment. Such firms are a dying breed for a good reason: Cloud-based email solutions simplify administration, typically enhance security, provide broader ease of access and often lower total overall operating costs. Organizations that haven’t already migrated email service to the cloud, subsequently, are likely to begin doing so.

Common pitfalls of local-to-cloud email migration projects include prolonged outages, complex DNS failures, misconfigured mailboxes, overlooked users, forgotten devices and failed access to legacy messages. Successful migrations require meticulous planning and careful collaboration, including with the email cloud services provider and any third-party managed migration services partner that often assists with such local-to-cloud email migrations.

Employing a checklist early in the process helps ensure such projects are well organized and proceed in proper order. Local email server-to-cloud migrations consist of numerous steps and myriad phases. A checklist — such as TechRepublic Premium’s xlsx file — enforces planning by requiring IT staff to stop and consider a range of issues and details, while also breaking such a complex project into readily manageable bite-size chunks.