Most migration checklists cover user accounts thoroughly. Service accounts get a fraction of that attention.

On one project, we mapped, moved, and validated every user account. Access confirmed. Cutover looked clean.

Two hours later a reporting process failed silently. Then another. Then a third integration surfaced that nobody had flagged during discovery because it “just ran” — no owner, no documentation, no one who remembered setting it up.

All three were running under service accounts that never made it into migration scope. They weren’t user accounts. They were operational infrastructure living in Active Directory in places nobody thought to look.

Since then, service account discovery is one of the first things I do on any project. The technical work isn’t hard. The accounts are just invisible until something breaks — and when they break, they break quietly, hours after the dashboard showed green.

How do you handle service account discovery on your projects — and how often does something still slip through?

#Migration #DataValidation #CloudMigration #ActiveDirectory