How Skaylink delivers Microsoft 365 migrations clients can stake their reputation on

Marius Ieta compares migration tools the way some people compare cars: regularly, rigorously, and with a spreadsheet. As a Microsoft 365 consultant at Skaylink - A Vodafone Company, a German IT services firm specializing in cloud migrations and Microsoft 365 environments, he has to.

He checks the market, splits costs by user, and runs the numbers on what a license actually covers versus what it sounds like it covers. The answer is always ShareGate. Flat annual pricing, every workload bundled in one tool, and support that resolves issues before the overnight run starts.

"I double-check constantly. If you're not competitive in the tools you're using, another partner will come with a better price. It's a free market."

For a partner running multiple tenants a year, that math is hard to argue with.

Skaylink's Microsoft 365 practice runs on complexity. Tenant-to-tenant migrations with hard deadlines. Emergency recoveries where the client's old environment isn't coming back. Cross-language environments. Clients who add scope mid-project without blinking. The expectation, every time, is that Skaylink delivers, cleanly, completely, and on time.

Two recent projects show what that looks like in practice.

Project one: A tenant-to-tenant migration with  700 users, a Japanese language environment, a skeleton crew, and a hard stop before Christmas. The only path through was automation. When the client added Planner to scope mid-project without knowing how many instances they even had, Skaylink needed to scope and deliver it the same week.

Project two: A bad actor accessed a client’s five on-prem file servers overnight, exploiting open permissions to impersonate users and encrypt files while everyone slept.The data was recovered, but rebuilding the old servers wasn't worth it. New hardware had months-long delivery windows, and the client already had SharePoint Online space sitting unused. Moving to SharePoint Online was the only path forward. Getting there was the work.

Different problems. One constant: the client expects it done.

Project one: When manual isn't an option, automation runs while the team sleeps

Marius can move roughly 200 users manually on a good day. With 700 users and a Christmas deadline, that wasn't a plan. It was a guarantee of missing a deadline. The scope alone made manual work impossible: OneDrives, SharePoint sites, Teams, Planner, and the groups and content of 700 people, all needing to land intact in a new tenant. ShareGate's scripting let Skaylink batch the migrations and run them overnight, unattended. The team slept. The project moved.

English-to-Japanese OneDrive mappings don't translate themselves. Nobody flagged it until it was the only thing standing between Skaylink and the overnight run. One call with ShareGate's support team sorted it.

"ShareGate support gave us the last piece of advice. Make the template, save it, import it, and your OneDrive migration will go overnight for 700 users. And it went smoothly without any problems."

When the client added Planner mid-project, Marius ran a report with ShareGate, had a full CSV in twenty seconds, and sent a timeline estimate the same day. Three days later, everything was migrated into the correct Teams structure in the new tenant, intact, not scattered across it.

The second tenant was bigger in every way. More users, a larger SharePoint footprint, and four times the Teams data. Skaylink upgraded to ShareGate Migrate Pro and dedicated separate servers to SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, and Planner, with a fifth on standby so a Windows update or hardware issue could never stop the project. The second tenant landed on schedule too.

"The upgrade from Migrate Essentials to Pro is very easy with ShareGate. That was not a problem."

Project two: From breach to governed, rebuilding on SharePoint Online

The second project started with a phone call no IT team wants to make. Someone had gotten into all five of a client's on-prem file servers overnight. Universal access sounds democratic, but in practice? It's an open invitation. A bad actor used it to impersonate users and encrypt files while everyone slept.

The data was recovered, but rebuilding the compromised servers wasn't worth it. New hardware had months-long delivery windows, and the client already had SharePoint Online space sitting unused. Moving to SharePoint Online was the answer. Same folder structure, cleaner department layout, and every file in its place.

Marius used ShareGate to analyze the existing file structure and map it to the client's new department layout, then moved files in batches overnight with full output logging.

"I don't deliver a PowerShell output that nobody can read. With ShareGate, I have an Excel output I can put in a ticket and hand to the customer."
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Every file type moved without issue and without a GB ceiling. Because ShareGate moves data directly from the client's tenant into their Azure Blob storage, it never touches an external server. Marius makes a point of explaining it to every client in Europe who asks about data sovereignty.

"ShareGate moves your data from your server, from your tenant, to a specific Azure Blob storage that also belongs to your tenant. It's not going over a server located in another region. Your data, your custody."

Before the breach, every internal user had access to every file across all five servers, with no restrictions, no data owners, no meaningful controls. After the recovery, every permission in their new SharePoint Online environment is intentional, every site has an owner, and nothing is left open by default. The breach forced the questions. ShareGate gave Marius the tools to build the answers.