Are you setting yourself up for failure by promising zero downtime during your next enterprise migration?

Zero downtime is an important sales phrase. It sounds reassuring during a kickoff presentation, but it falls apart when you encounter a real enterprise environment. After migrating over 1,000 mailboxes between multiple programs, I have stopped using this phrase.

The truthful version of what a good migration delivery looks is minimal and planned interruption with a rapid recover path baked in before maintenance window opens. This is a difficult sentence to convey in a presentation. It is the only one that works.

Hyper Care Support’s work in three phases post-migration taught me that some disruption is inevitable. The difference between a well-run and a poorly-run migration is not whether or not issues arise after cutover. After cutover, issues always arise. It is not whether they were anticipated, planned for, and a resolution path was documented before any user called the help desk.

The Azure Migration Runbook that I designed for a large divestiture programme built recovery procedures from the start into the plan. The operating assumption was that there would never be zero issues. It was never zero unplanned issues. This frame changes what is built into the runbook, and what the business stakeholders are told about what success means.

BitTitan MigrationWiz provides visibility into migration status and error logs. It also shows item-level failures. It cannot give you the judgment to act based on what these logs tell you at 2 AM, during a cutover period. This judgment comes from engineers that anticipated the problems.

What do your migration success criteria measure and who agreed on it before the project began?

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