So, yeah, so we see all kinds of projects. A lot of it is migrating in hybrid environments from AD to O365. A lot of it's consolidations from acquisitions, tenant to tenant migrations. Yeah. There's definitely a lot of also typically coexistence and domain moves that are part of that process. So a lot of moving parts and re-branding. So a lot going on. So we do a lot of migrations. And we have had some clients choose to save some money and go with no tools. And that makes the projects that much harder. You've got to manage everything manually. You're adding scripts to customize, tracking what's been put in place, there's different coexistence and history get impacted. So it's definitely harder. Yeah. Some of the challenges, too, are around just when there is not automation or a tool set that helps. If you do make some changes, it's more of a manual process to roll those back. So just some time savings with-- or the inverse of that, (LAUGHS) you can spend a lot of time manually undoing some of the changes you made. Well, the automation and the tool sets allow us to bring together systems much quicker, which means the companies, the business, can start saving money by reducing the duplication in environments. No longer do you have to keep two different HR systems, two accounting, financial systems. Once we start migrating everything over, the applications and the users, they can go ahead and start the benefit of using single system. And it's also great, the comprehensiveness of the [? ODM ?] toolset so you can migrate the mailbox, OneDrive, Teams content, SharePoint. So you have visibility and with the dashboard to have a great overview of that migration process where you are in that and be able to communicate with your customer on the progress. We do a lot of different type of migrations, and we've used a lot of different toolsets. The Quest product is mature. The support behind it is solid. The contact and response when we need it is always there. And with that maturity in the software, we've got the features we need to make the coexistence smooth with the migrations, smooth. And so it's been definitely the reliable toolset that we often go to. We do see a lot of tenant consolidation from companies coming together. We see a lot of [? on prem, ?] hybrid migrations to 365. Those are really the main ones we're seeing now. Definitely that's what we're seeing. Definitely a lot of acquisitions where there is a transition into a target environment, usually from multiple smaller business units. So a lot of migrations, domain moves, basically, a lot of merger and de-merger activity. [MUSIC PLAYING]

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, I'm Cameron, and I want to talk to you today with Becky about Active Directory migrations. So Becky, often when we're talking with customers, they're talking to us about Active Directory migrations, consolidations, things of that nature. Why do you find the reasons exist for them to want to look at things like migration and consolidation of Active Directory? Well, it started out initially as part of migration. They perform a tenant to tenant migration, for instance, but they leave their Active Directory behind and they don't want to do anything with it. But then they realize afterwards that their users are having a really rough time and they are controlling two different identities. They're having to log in to different resources in different ways, and it's quite the struggle and quite the impact on end users. And so they realized that they actually should really start planning for an Active Directory consolidation as well to follow that tenant to tenant migration scenario. And so that's the user impact. Have you seen other impacts as well? Yeah, that's a good question. Obviously, the user impact is the first and foremost one that organizations tend to think of. But often, things like impact to administrators, organizational administrative staff who have to not only look after Active Directory, but potentially have requirements to look at the security posture, things of that nature, start to run into issues with Active Directory when you have multiple Active Directory domains within an organization. Yeah. It's a good point. And you know what's really tough is you can't just jump into an AD consolidation, right? And what we see is that a lot of people have this coexistence period and they're having to live for a long amount of time. And so you have to make sure, even if you're planning for an AD consolidation of some sort, that you can have some Directory integration, some coexistence Directory Sync, things like that. And like I said, I see that with migrations. But my understanding is there are other reasons why you might do an AD consolidation. What are some other examples you've seen? That's a good question, Becky. The reasons that I often talk with customers about AD and consolidations quite often focuses around reduction of risk and reducing things like the attack surface. Because obviously, Active Directory is a key area that bad actors will look for. So organizations are quite often looking to reduce that attack surface and minimize their security posture. So being able to not only reduce risk, but then also simplify the management of the environment that they have as well. That makes sense. And the other thing I've seen is now more and more companies are starting to modernize, and especially migrating to Azure Active Directory, which is pretty new. That's not even anything about a migration or separate environments. That's just truly moving to a brand new place. And so it's great to be able to do any sort of Active Directory consolidation, whether it's on prem or in the cloud. So thanks. This was a really good information. Thanks, Cam. Thanks, Becky. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Welcome. This is Quest Unscripted. A vlog series on trending topics. And Quest solutions related to Active Directory. Office 365. Oh, and don't forget, Azure AD. You are here because you have questions. We're here because we have answers. I think. We will address questions we've received from customers-- Experiencing the same challenges as you. All with the goal of helping you confidently move-- Manage-- And secure your Microsoft environment. We call the show Quest Unscripted because-- Except for this intro-- Nothing we say is scripted or rehearsed. And we're pretty sure you'll notice that right away. Hey guys, thanks for joining. Greetings, guys. Today, we're going to be talking about migrations and security. We've got Jeff and Bryan. I'm just going to ask a question and I'll let you guys answer it, and we'll go back and forth. In a nutshell, can doing a migration help us become more secure as an organization? It can, if you change the behavior of how you're managing your network. If you haven't changed how you're managing your network, if you haven't categorized tier zero type stuff, then no. But if you have changed your management methodology and you're moving and consolidating, there's a lot less objects you have to look at. So in that instance, it would be a yes. So it's that one famous thing. It depends. It depends on you, as a customer, right? Yeah, I mean, Jeff, you've been doing this for a long time. What's your opinion into it? What's the benefits? I guess security has changed the migration landscape, or vice versa. What's your thoughts? Really, by changing the way you manage in a lot of distributed domains, forests, they're all managed differently by different people. Everybody's got their own fiefdom. And you need to consolidate these fiefdoms, and run by one policy, not by 12 policies because you have 12 forests. You don't have 12 CIOs. So you should only have one of everything that the CIO has to manage. Bryan, what are some of the AD compromises that may be a result of not consolidating on premises Active Directory environments? Well, it's just a matter of your having limited resources. So those resources have to manage multiple different environments. It means they can't focus their energies across absolutely everything. So it's kind of a trick question, right? Because compromise of one AD, it feels completely siloed. Well, hopefully it contains that AD, unless you've got to trust they can actually go out to yet another AD. So I feel like simpler management, like to Jeff's point, less to manage, less objects, less that we have to police and take care of. But it's a matter of actually establishing the behavior and understanding current best practices. I've seen many organizations just do a migration to do a migration. But if they still have to meet admins logging on to workstations as an example, that hash is still sitting out there, well, they did this migration. They haven't changed the behavior. So they're going to muddy up the water. And their new environments could be the same conditions as their old environment pretty quickly. Jeff, any thoughts? Yeah, a lot of customers still have an empty route that they built back in 2000 when they initially came out with Active Directory, and managed as such. I mean, are they prepared today for the hacks and ransomware that's coming their way today? Are they ready for the cloud? I think when Microsoft went from just a single domain within a forest to be synchronized up into the cloud, and allowed multiple domains to go into forest, and multiple forests, it caused kind of-- people stop migrating. Now, they've got to worry about the cloud, and so they just left everything in place. Yeah. So if I'm a customer listening to this and I'm about to embark on a migration, what's the best course of action for me to look at it from a security angle? I mean, where do I go? My recommendation, I'm a big fan of BloodHound. Use BloodHound Enterprise, do the security assessment, understand where you're exposed. So you can use that different data to figure out what the new environment should be like, if it's going to be a green belt. Even if you're doing a merchant acquisition, maybe you run out BloodHound Enterprise. If I have a very low exposure rate in my existing environment, yet the other environment has a 90% or 100% exposure rate, maybe I do a little bit of policing, and it's going to change how I do migrations. So a little bit of information on the front end can help you keep things secure as you're going through any kind of migration project. And for those customers who don't know what BloodHound is, what is BloodHound? BloodBorne is-- or BloodHound is a tool that's built for defenders for the BloodHound Enterprise, which will visually show you all different exposure to tier zero. If you don't know what tier zero is, think about group holds his links at the domain level, your domain admins, your built in administrators, your domain controllers. Any of those different things are automatically categorized by BloodHound Enterprise. Then you actually manually add in like your Azure AD Connect, ADFS, your AD backup servers. If I can get access to those things, I have all I need to take over in a full compromise of your environment. So I think identifying where those issues exist first, it's really probably a good idea. And Jeff, we're talking here. It doesn't matter what kind of migration it is. This is what Bryan was talking about, something we can help with regardless of source target, correct? Correct. So whether they're on-prem or you want to migrate into Azure and Azure exclusively, I mean, we're here for it. Great. Appreciate it. Thank you guys so much.

Hi. I'm Mike Weaver. I'm a technologist that focuses on merger acquisition and divestitures with a lot of work in Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migrations. Let's talk about my top planning tips for tenant-to-tenant migrations. The first tip is very early on, you need to make a decision if you're going to do a cutover migration, or a phased migration, or batch migration. This is one of the key aspects of planning your project. I used to be a big fan of cutover migrations. However, as time has gone on and these tenants have gotten larger and more and more complex, many firms are unable to do a cutover migration. It's important to understand the impacts of doing either decision that you make, as putting all the efforts into the cutover can sometimes allow you to minimize disruption and cross-team collaboration. However, there's a lot of risk associated with that. On the other aspect, when you plan a batch migration, it cuts down your risk, but you have to be very careful about how you plan your batches. Again, this is going to be a decision that's going project-by-project. The second aspect is you're going to need some tooling, particularly some of the workloads that don't support native options. When you look at tools, there are some free tools that are available that are in preview and a variety of paid tools that have different features. You're going to need to look at the total cost of ownership of these tools. This includes whether it's going to be a SaaS platform, if you're going to host it yourself, what it's going to take to operate these tools if it is one tool that does multiple workloads versus a bunch of little tools pushed together to make your solution work. All these are going to have different costs and payoff. Sometimes it's best to use one solution, one third party solution that brings it all together. Other projects, that may not be the case. But many do find it very difficult when doing the planning to understand the total cost of ownership in their tooling. The third tip is to understand your staffing needs for your project. When we think about a merger acquisition, and divestiture, and a tenant-to-tenant migration, there's so much more going on than just the Office 365 migration. When we look at all the other initiatives that are going on, it can be difficult to make staffing decisions on who's going to work on the migration project versus the other projects that might be going on. You may need to bring in consultants to help augment your staff in different areas. So understanding what those needs are going to be, who's going to work on what, and what makes sense as well as goals for the organization and the people working all has to come into play when you're doing your planning. Set reasonable expectations on the time that it's going to take and what people can accomplish with the time that they have. If you're doing multiple projects, the fourth tip is having a program, not a project plan. If you're doing multiple projects or they're large or complex, there is a lot of people, and processes, and help that needs to come in to make this work, especially with multiple projects going at once. You have to coordinate so many aspects of the organization, communications, the technology limitations, what people are using, reorganization, in some cases-- everything going at once. You don't want to plan with just a technical project plan when you really need a full change management program. When you see this happening in your planning, you want to ensure that this is part of it. And finally, don't undervalue the importance of end user interviews. I like to sit on help desk a couple of times a year, do end user interviews wherever I can. When I'm doing data analytics for a project, when I see something really interesting, I try to take a minute, meet up with that person, understand what they're doing, and ensure that it becomes part of the plan. And I encourage everyone as part of their tenant-to-tenant planning, when they see something interesting or just sitting down with a variety of people, to ensure that you've handled the most important aspects in your planning. Follow these tips and more for a successful Office 365 tenant-to-tenant migration project. [MUSIC PLAYING]

Challenges to the east. Challenges to the west. Challenges to the south. Challenges to the north. At Quest, we know an Office 365 migration is no small feat. And it can feel like you're devising a plan for battle, because when you risk losing the throne, or in your case, loads of valuable data, the weight of a kingdom is on your shoulders. But when challenges are coming from all around, we got what it takes to help you overcome the obstacles that stand in your way of getting to the Cloud. So where do you start? Like any good commander, start by taking stock of your forces. Assess your environment to decide what should be migrated and then optimize your current environment for the move. Next, take into account how users will coexist during the move. Will enemy factions unite to become one? Or will you need to take preventive measures so uneasiness and descent don't grow among users? Next, comes testing your move to ensure the desired outcome. In battle there are no practice runs, but you've got the opportunity. So make sure to test your migration plan to validate procedures and root out problems before you feel the heat of battle. Finally, decide when the scheduled attack, or migration, is most advantageous. Can it be completed during off-work hours? Or will users need to go without certain resources for a period of time? When it comes to ensuring the safety of your kingdom, you don't want to leave anything to chance. And the same goes for an Office 365 migration. Learn all eight steps needed for ensuring a successful migration. And see for yourself how you can keep your throne now and in the foreseeable future.