Migrating 60 Users to Create Music Group Following Acquisitions

Following their 2021 acquisition of two media companies, Create Music Group reached out to Google about bringing the new users into their existing Google Workspace tenant. Google connected the Create team with HiView Solutions due to our extensive experience with executing successful Workspace-to-Workspace (formerly G Suite) migrations.

The challenge

Create Music Group has a relatively complex tenant structure, with many disparate organizational units (OUs) and custom roles created according to their branches’ needs. Additionally, some accounts to be migrated were quite large due to their video storage. A Virtual Machine (VM) was not initially scoped for the project, but the consultant swiftly determined that these larger accounts would require more resources for an effective migration to take place. 

The approach

Prior to migration, the HiView consultant worked with the Create team to delete redundant user accounts. The project scope was then updated to include a VM; this expedited the data transfer rate and allowed the consultant to migrate from both source tenants simultaneously by using the hosted version of CloudM. HiView’s team usually completes migrations on Friday evenings to minimize user disruption, but because weekends were actually quite busy for the Create team, a Monday evening migration was selected.

Per Create’s business needs, custom roles were configured for Super Admins so that they could manage only their designated OUs. Create’s IT team made internal changes as needed per HiView’s recommendations, including pausing 2-step verification to prevent user interruption.

The results

• 60 total users migrated
• 10 Shared Drives migrated
• ~1 hour of user downtime occurred after hours
• All files and access permissions were migrated