Case study · SMB / Legal · Denver, USA
ITSECOPS moved a Denver law firm from GoDaddy email to its own Microsoft 365 tenant overnight — zero hours of downtime, 100% of mail, calendar invites and contacts retained, and enterprise-grade security switched on from day one at no extra cost.
The client
A boutique law firm in Denver with 38 mailboxes across partners, associates and staff, running on GoDaddy-hosted email that the firm had long outgrown — reseller lock-in, limited admin control and none of the security features their cyber-insurance renewal was starting to ask about.
The challenge
Court dates live in calendars. The partners’ condition for the project was blunt: not one lost email, not one dropped calendar invite, and no downtime during business hours. Previous quotes had proposed a weekend of frozen mailboxes — unacceptable for a firm where matters move daily.
What we did
- Built a clean, firm-owned Microsoft 365 tenant — licensed direct, out of the reseller relationship.
- Inventoried every mailbox, alias, distribution list and shared calendar before touching anything.
- Pre-synced all mail data ahead of cutover, then flipped MX records after a final delta pass outside business hours — users left on Friday on GoDaddy and signed in Monday to Microsoft 365 with everything in place.
- Verified retention item-for-item: mail, folder structures, calendar invites, contacts and shared calendars reconciled against pre-migration counts.
- Hardened the new tenant as a complimentary add-on: MFA enforced for every user, data loss prevention (DLP) policies for client-confidential data, and SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured to stop spoofing of the firm’s domain.
Results
- 0 hours of downtime — mail flow never stopped, and no user lost the ability to send or receive at any point.
- 100% data retained — every mailbox, calendar invite and contact arrived intact and verified.
- MFA enforcement and DLP live from day one — delivered free as part of the migration, and credited by the firm’s insurer at renewal.
FAQ
Is there downtime when the MX records switch?
No. Because all data is replicated before cutover and the MX change happens after a final delta sync, mail simply starts arriving in the new tenant. Users experience a sign-in change, not an outage.
Will we lose old emails or calendar invites?
No. Everything is pre-copied and then reconciled against per-mailbox item counts before the old platform is retired. In this project, retention was 100% — verified, not assumed.
How long does a GoDaddy to Microsoft 365 migration take?
For an SMB, typically one to two weeks of preparation and a single overnight cutover. The users’ working week is never interrupted.