petabyte

Microsoft completes world's largest email migration, moving 2.3 Petabytes of data

England’s National Health Service (NHS) has completed the LARGEST-EVER migration of enterprise email accounts, moving 2.1 million mailboxes from on-premise servers to Microsoft’s Exchange Online.

This 6 month project represents the largest mass migration of enterprise email accounts ever handled by Microsoft. NHS Digital, the tech arm of the UK’s public health service, began migrating mail accounts to the cloud in August 2020.

"We have deployed a Microsoft Hybrid implementation of Office 365 to the NHS mail platform, which is allowing NHS organizations to provision Office 365 services much faster, integrate with the existing NHS mail identity, and collaborate more easily. "

Chris Parsons, head of collaboration services at NHS Digital, explained that the project involved shifting some 2.3 PETABYTES of data… that’s 2.3 MILLION GIGs of data! He said he used an “army” of NHS IT administrators as well as teams from NHS Digital, Microsoft, and professional services firm Accenture. “Micorsoft tends to deal with big enterprises, but no where a near as complex as the way that the NHS is structured,” said Parsons. Some 16,000 to 17,000 IT admins work within the NHS, working with local organizations to run, maintain and update services provided by NHS Digital. Why would this require such an ‘army’ of admins?

Well, the biggest challenge would be the difference in technology that organizations had deployed on the ground. You can hope that everyone was on the latest versions of software, but that’s just isn’t the case. So, these admins worked with everyone involved, so as to meet or even exceed the prerequisites required to perform this massive data migration to the cloud.

NHS Digital has been working closely with Microsoft in recent years to help move healthcare staff onto modern software and operating systems. Microsoft Teams was also deployed NHS-wide at the start of the UK COVID outbreak, enabling vital remote communication between healthcare teams battling the virus. Parsons described the impact Teams had as “a game-changer”.

"What we've seen since then is just a massive acceleration in uptake in the use of Teams. The last time we took a snapshot of the data, we had a total of about 134 million chat messages, about 3.5 million meetings and just over 13 million calls using Teams from March last year, up until about two weeks ago."
Chris Parsons
Head of Collaboration - NHS Digital

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