Breaking up is hard to do!
A Divestiture is very different from a Merger or Acquisition. For organizations that do this kind of work regularly, a Divestiture can throw them for a loop and highly underestimate the effort needed to complete the project. The main issue is how to separate data, and, at the root challenge, doing this safely and in a secure manner.
Our data repositories are designed to be like Hotel California: You can check in but you can never check out. Data exports are risky, requiring us to break down barriers and protections we worked so hard to put in place. Rarely did we plan for exports, something that e-Discovery teams I’m sure can complain about here as well.
Let’s break down the two common issues with Divestitures in our market: The Inherent Problems and the Added Challenges when users are on Office 365.
Inherent Problems with Divestitures
Divestitures take M&A challenges to the next level. Not only are we exporting data, but we are sending it willingly to an external party, and in some cases a competitor. (All the things we rarely want to do and work to block!) We have to be very careful that we share the data needed, and nothing more. In many cases this requires us to split up shared repositories into the correct pieces. In summary, we have limited options and high risk.
At the bottom of this blog post is information about a webinar I am doing on the topic next week in more detail. (If you are viewing this post after the webinar, you can view the recording on this link as well)
Office 365 Divestitures – Added Challenges
Any of us doing Office 365 migrations know how hard it is to do these migrations. However, with the still limited options, divestitures add a lot of difficulties. Furthermore, with services that do not migrate, exporting certain data types are not even possible.
For example, if the users collaborate on Yammer, as of writing this article, there is no method to import and export this data into a new tenant. This leaves the only option of doing an eDiscovery search with limited options.
Upcoming Webinar:
If you want to learn more about this topic, I will be hosting a webinar with live Q&A next week!
I will I cover in detail how we need both a user drive process and a discovery process. Users need to identify data that needs to move, and we need to use discovery methods to confirm we are not oversharing, and to ensure we don’t miss any shared repositories.
Office 365 Tenant Divestitures: How to manage your breakup
April 21
11AM ET / 4PM BST
Register Here!
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