The challenge
After Blue Ant Media's own move to Microsoft 365, its animation studio Atomic Cartoons still ran on a separate Google Workspace estate: 1,021 users, dozens of terabytes of production data, and its own domain history and identity footprint. Every day the two platforms stayed apart meant duplicate licensing, split administration, and collaboration friction between the studio and the rest of the group.
Animation production is unforgiving of downtime. Artists work against delivery dates, and their files, render pipelines, and review workflows could not stall while accounts moved - so the consolidation had to run in verified stages, on a cutover date the studio's leadership chose.
Our approach
BITSUMMIT structured the consolidation around the playbook proven on the group's first migration, moving the studio into the existing Blue Ant tenant in verified stages.
Identity first
Atomic user accounts were provisioned in the shared tenant with a hard username-change cutoff agreed ahead of cutover, so identity settled before data moved. MFA re-registration was sequenced ahead of device enrollment, because device joins gate on a working MFA method.
Files before mail
OneDrive and shared-drive data migrated fully ahead of the mail cutover and was verified as complete.
Mail in managed waves
Mailbox history is moving in staged waves with migration throughput actively managed, and chat history is re-seeded and tracked user by user.
Timed around production
The final cutover was scheduled with the studio's leadership around production reality, with external application dependencies handled through coordinated change windows.
The outcome
When the final wave lands, the entire Blue Ant group, studio included, will run on one governed Microsoft 365 tenant. File data is already migrated and verified, and 1,021 users are moving along a proven, staged path.
Split administration and duplicate licensing end with the move, and the wave-based approach keeps the studio's delivery schedule protected throughout.
