Multi-Tenant Consolidation CUSTOMER PROFILE Drives Business Success Accord Financial consolidates six tenants into one in just six months to enable even better financial services. Company Accord Financial Industry Finance Country and Canada Website accordfinancial.com

BUSINESS NEED To better serve its clients, Accord Financial Corp. needed to unite all its commercial lending businesses under a single brand. Therefore, the IT team needed a way to quickly and securely consolidate six separate 365 tenants.

SOLUTION With Quest migration solutions, the small migration team was able to complete the initial phase of the consolidation project in just six months, enabling the company to streamline its operations and present a unified brand to the world.

BENEFITS • Enabled consolidation of six tenants in just six months

• Delivered a fast, secure migration of all key workloads, including email, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams

• Ensured users could continue to work and collaborate throughout the project

• Enabled the migration team “Even with limited IT staff, we were able to seamlessly transition to working from home to consolidate six tenants in just six months SOLUTIONS AT A GLANCE with the help of On Demand Migration.” • Microsoft Platform Management

Mark Iwankow Director of Information Technology Accord Financial Corp. Microsoft 365 tenant-to-tenant migrations are becoming both more common and more complex all the time. Even as organizations are rapidly adopting the full breadth of workloads the platform offers, including email, SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams, merger and acquisition (M&A) activity is heating up. As a result, IT pros need to have reliable, effective tenant migration tools at the ready. For Accord Financial Corp., that’s On Demand Migration and “I wasn't disappointed Metalogix Essentials for Office 365. Using these powerful in anything with the solutions, a small team was able to consolidate six tenants within Quest migration just six months, delighting users and earning strong praise from solutions. That's top management. Naturally, Quest will be the company’s vendor of surprising to someone choice for future tenant migrations as well. like me who’s been AN AGGRESSIVE GOAL: Merging six tenants is complicated in IT a long time. The CONSOLIDATING SIX enough, but several factors made this TENANTS IN SIX MONTHS project even more challenging. First, products delivered Founded in 1978, Accord Financial Corp., the migration team was small, had limited exactly as promised, is one of North America’s top commercial budget and was struggling with long-haul finance companies. Accord helps small COVID-19 symptoms to boot. Second, and then some.” and medium-sized organizations across they were new to the organization and the U.S. and Canada manage cash determined to deliver on two incredibly aggressive deadlines. Mark Iwankow flow and maximize opportunities by Director of Information Technology offering a broad range of asset-based “Our goal was to have all the tenants Accord Financial Corp. lending solutions for financing acquisi- migrated into the target within six months, tions, restructuring or rebuilding, or simply with everyone’s email flowing there and transitioning to the next level of growth. everyone using the same Teams address,” To deliver even faster and more explains Mark Iwankow, Director of - flexible financing services, Accord mation Technology at Accord Financial needed to streamline its organizational Corp. “Then, we planned to finish the structure and unite all its commercial migration within the next six months lending businesses under a single by migrating all the file systems brand. Bringing this business strategy into OneDrive and SharePoint.” to fruition required a significant IT effort: The audacity of these goals wasn’t lost consolidating six separate Microsoft 365 on Iwankow. “A lot of people, including tenants into one. IT pros at Microsoft, said, ‘This is highly ambitious! How are you going to do it?’” he recalls. “But we did it. We were able to consolidate six tenants in just six months with the help of On Demand Migration.”

PRODUCTS & SERVICES

SOFTWARE On Demand Migration

Metalogix Essentials for Office 365

2 THE KEY TO SUCCESS: THE PROCESS: MIGRATING CHOOSING THE RIGHT TOOLS ALL WORKLOADS WITH EASE Microsoft offers very limited tools to Despite the fatigue and other after-effects help with tenant-to-tenant migrations, of COVID-19, the team was able to keep and at the start of Accord Financial’s the tenant-to-tenant migration project consolidation project, there were even on track, thanks to the Quest solutions. fewer native options. Therefore, Iwankow "The first step was to analyze everything," began looking for a third-party solution recalls Iwankow. "The tenants were all in that would help his team migrate all different states of adoption of Microsoft Microsoft 365 workloads, including 365; some were just using email and Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint weren't quite Teams-ready, while others and Teams. were using all the different workflows. Once we started the migration jobs, we “On Demand Migration was at the top could easily track and control everything.” of our list. I had played with a demo of it at a previous employer, and we saw that When the pandemic led to lockdowns, Gartner named Quest the only vendor the project barely suffered a hiccup. to deliver all 40 of the 40 basic features “Because On Demand Migration is a and functionalities expected in a cloud SaaS solution, we lost only about half a office migration tool,” Iwankow says. day of productivity when everyone was “But we checked out pretty much sent home," notes Iwankow. "The next everything we could find on the market, day was a normal work day for us, just “Whenever I talk including CodeTwo and BitTitan. We handling the migration tasks from home looked at a lot of different suites — but instead of the office.” to anyone who's nothing touched On Demand Migration.” Using the Quest solutions, the team migrating, I point them On Demand Migration enables was able to clean up the Azure Active at Quest. You're not organizations to simply and securely Directory objects in each of the six consolidate and migrate their Office 365 tenants, pruning out duplicates and going to find anything tenants, whether due to M&A activity objects that were no longer being used. or as part of a cleanup effort to reduce They were able to easily migrate email. better. The costs and complexity. An intuitive SharePoint, OneDrive and even Teams. dashboard tracks progress in real "With Teams being used so heavily across makes migration easy.” time and delivers complete visibility our organization, it was great to be able to and control, and users can continue bring over private chats so that our users Mark Iwankow to communicate and collaborate could just pick right up where they left off," Director of Information Technology seamlessly throughout the project. Iwankow say. "We brought over the chat Accord Financial Corp. history without much trouble, and then we Accord Financial also selected were able to find each user and add that Metalogix Essentials for Office 365. chat to their history." With this complete solution for Office 365 pre-migration analysis, migration “I wasn't disappointed in anything with the and management, organizations can Quest migration solutions,” Iwankow adds. use a single console to easily move “That's surprising to someone like me and reorganize content from multiple who’s been in IT a long time. The products cloud service providers and on-premises delivered exactly as promised, and then SharePoint and file shares, manage some. They are absolutely amazing.” permissions and licenses, and gather valuable intelligence about user adoption.

3 THE RESULT: In fact, Iwankow recommends the Quest HAPPINESS ALL AROUND migration solutions without reservation. With the Quest solutions, the migration “I don't generally go out and make over- proved to be an unmitigated success. tures about a product, but whenever I “The users are happy, the team is happy talk to anyone who's migrating, I point and the board is exceedingly happy,” them at Quest,” he says. “You're not going notes Iwankow. “We were able to make to find anything better. The software a tremendous impact across the company makes migration easy. It's reliable — when in less than a year, and we couldn't have it tells me it's done, it's done. I can count done it without the Quest migration tools.” on it. I have no qualms about telling every- one to get the Quest solutions. And when Iwankow's advice to others embarking Accord Financial makes future acquisi- on a tenant-to-tenant migration is simple: tions, we're going to migrate their cloud “Take it one piece at a time. Work with tenants with the Quest solutions. That's your identities and groups first. Find a part of our process now, because it's group that hasn't been touched in three proven to work.” years, and try migrating it. You'll see just how quick and easy it is. Then, you’ll have ABOUT QUEST the confidence to move on to the other Quest creates software solutions that components of the migration. The steps make the benefits of new technology real are very easy to follow, and the software in an increasingly complex IT landscape. does the work.” From and systems manage- ment, to and Office 365 management, and cyber security resil- “We were able to make ience, Quest helps customers solve their a tremendous impact next IT challenge now. Quest Software. Where next meets now. across the company in less than a year, and we couldn't have done it without the Quest migration tools.”

Mark Iwankow Director of Information Technology Accord Financial Corp.

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