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garyrhoward's avatar
garyrhoward
Copper Contributor
Apr 13, 2022

M365 GCC High to M365 Commercial migration

I have seen several articles about tenant-to-tenant migrations including M365 commercial migrations to M365 GCC High but have not seen any that provide guidance about migrating from M365 GCC High back to M365 commercial.  I know this is an unusual scenario but I have a customer who wants to do it.  Of course, having a lab environment would work best for testing but it would be hard to get in configured in short order.  Can someone from Microsoft chime in and a) explain possible strategies b) any past experience, c) would it require 3rd-party tools d) is there anything Microsoft can do on the backend to facilitate the migration, and e) how to handle licensing.

 

Thanks,

Gary Howard

microsoft 365
    • SabersKiss's avatar
      SabersKiss
      Copper Contributor
      Jul 21, 2023

      We recently went through this with a small city client. We went back and forth with Microsoft support for months. (They are SO slow to respond). There is no supported migration to convert an existing tenant.

       

      From what I was able to glean from Microsoft's replies, it sounds like the GCC low & GCC high tenants reside on different servers than commercial tenants. So, they can't just be changed to a different status.

       

      In the end we created a new 365 commercial tenant and used a 3rd party migration tool (BitTitan) to move/copy the users Mailboxes & OneDrives over to the new tenant.

      • ChinniRavi's avatar
        ChinniRavi
        Copper Contributor
        Jul 21, 2023

        SabersKiss many thanks for the reply, was very helpful. My customer's intent is to create a new M365 Commercial tenant too then copy the data. Did you encounter any challenges/ unsupported scenarios performing the copy from the GCC tenant? Apart from Mail, OneDrive we have Teams workload too. 

         

        Regards,
        Ravi

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