Assessment
You cannot commit to a cutover date before you know what is in the environment.
The Readiness Assessment is how you find out. It produces seven documents about your estate as it actually is — and you keep them, whether or not Sunrise runs the migration.
What you receive
Seven documents. Written for your team to use, not for us to present. Four of them are the same documents a full migration produces — they carry forward and are kept current as the work runs.
- Estate inventory
- Identity, licensing, mail flow, domains, devices, and what authenticates against the tenant. What is actually there, not what the documentation says.
- Tenant configuration baseline
- Every setting that governs the tenant, exported as code with Microsoft365DSC rather than captured in screenshots. A target can then be built to match it, and later drift is visible rather than discovered.
- Dependency map
- What has to move before what, and the reason in each case.
- Remediation register
- What must be fixed before anything moves, what can wait, and who owns each item.
- Migration plan
- Waves, sequence, a cutover window, and the rollback position at each stage.
- Validation criteria
- What finished means for each wave, agreed before anything moves rather than argued about afterwards.
- Assumptions and risks
- What the plan depends on being true, written down so your team can challenge it.
See a dependency map in full, written against an invented estate
What it tells you
- Which assumptions about the estate are wrong. There is always at least one, and it is usually about who has access to what.
- What has to be fixed before anything moves — and what can safely wait until after.
- What order it has to happen in. Sequencing is most of the difficulty in a complex move, and it cannot be worked out from a licensing report.
- Which shape the move has to take. Whether the estate can move together, needs its history staged in advance, or needs a period of coexistence — and what each of those means for the cutover window.
- What a realistic cutover window looks like for this estate, rather than for an average one.
- What finished means for each wave, defined before the first one starts.
- Where the risk actually is. Frequently not where the project plan says it is.
Why it has value on its own
You keep all seven documents.
They are yours from the moment they are delivered.
They are written to be executed from, by anyone.
Your own team, your existing MSP, or a different firm entirely. Nothing is left deliberately incomplete so that somebody has to call us back.
They are what makes a fixed price possible.
A firm quoting a complex migration without discovery is quoting a guess and pricing the risk into it. This is the work that removes the guess — whoever ends up doing the migration.
How it runs
What we need
Read access to the tenants, and time with the people who know what is actually running — usually not the same people who wrote the documentation.
What gets examined
Identity and access, licensing, mail flow and connectors, domains and DNS, device management, and the applications and integrations authenticating against the tenant.
Nothing is changed
It is an assessment. No configuration is altered, no agents are installed, and nothing moves.
Roughly how long
A small estate is days. A multi-tenant estate with unclear ownership is weeks, and discovery frequently finds the reason it will take longer.
What happens next
With the plan in hand, the migration itself follows one of three paths — depending on where you are coming from.
Questions people ask before committing
Our documentation is current. Do we still need this?
The assessment reads the tenant rather than the documentation, and the two disagree more often than not. The disagreement is the useful part.
Where documentation is genuinely current it shortens the work rather than removing it. The estate still has to be exported, and a plan still has to be built from what is there on the day.
Does this commit us to Sunrise for the migration?
No. The documents are yours on delivery, and they are written to be executed from by anyone — your team, your existing provider, or a different firm.
That is the point of buying it separately. A migration quoted without discovery has the unknown priced into it, and this is the work that removes the unknown regardless of who runs the move.
What if it finds we are not ready?
That is a result rather than a failure, and it arrives as a list of what has to be fixed first, in order, with an owner against each item.
Finding it here costs a remediation register. Finding it during a cutover costs a rollback.
Can our existing provider run the migration from it?
Yes, and that is a normal outcome. The plan states waves, sequence, the cutover window and what finished means at each stage, which is what an implementer needs.
Nothing is held back to make a second conversation necessary.
Ask about a Readiness Assessment.
Tell us how many tenants are involved, roughly how many people, and what has already been tried.