Beware of the pitfalls of Google Workspace to Google Workspace migration

When your business grows at some point, you'll reach a stage when organisational regrouping is necessary. Whether you just merged with a larger company or expanded to new territories, you'll need to re-organise your IT as well. You need to change your business domain name or add a new one for a different location (e.g., yourcomany.fr, yourcompany.de) 

When both the parent company and newly acquired business use Google Workspace, it may seem like an easy job. You might be thinking that it's just a matter of swapping the domain. A few clicks and your job is done.

You couldn't be more wrong. Google to Google migration doesn't work like this, and there are some risks involved that most businesses are not aware of. So let me try to explain:

How do you conduct such migration? 

The first thing you have to understand is that it is not actually a migration.

You can't simply move users' data from an old Google tenant to the new one. Changing a domain while keeping all the data requires to: 

• First, create the new temporary tenant in the destination instance
• Add there all users, groups you need in the destination instance
• Make a copy of all emails and drive files to this temporary tenant
• Add temporary domain in every source tenant
• Rename users, groups and its aliases in the source tenant to be able to move the domain name to the new tenant
• Only then we can rename the new files and profiles to their original names and make accounts available to users
• You still need a delta migration for Drive and emails, and finally, migration of Calendar, Tasks, and contacts.

So you see, on the outside, it looks like nothing has changed for the end-user, but technically you have deleted their old account and given them brand new ones. The whole process requires many technicalities happening in the background that you don't see. These tasks cannot be done automatically, so there is always the risk of a human error. 

What are the risks of switching from Google to Google?

There is a high risk here that you might realise you are missing some files once the migration is finished. So you need to make sure that your data is copied the right way. 

Doing it for several companies at once increases the complexity even further. A critical part of the process happens when you delete the source domain. It creates a window of time where users cannot access their accounts. They have to stop using their old accounts and start using new ones. 

This is why having an experienced partner to help you with this kind of migration is always a good idea. It will help you minimise the downtime and disruption to your daily business. An adept deployment engineer will have the necessary know-how to ensure that your data is copied the right way and that you do not lose anything. 

If you have any questions about Google to Google migration or you would like to discuss your particular use case, we are always happy to provide you with advice. Get in touch at workspace@revolgy.com.