M365 backup in Tianhe

A M365 backup project in Tianhe looks simple on a spreadsheet and rarely stays that way. The first question is the one nobody asks outside China: the global Microsoft tenant, or the local 21Vianet service? From there it becomes a design exercise — keeping mail flowing, Teams history intact, and an audit trail your head office can actually read.

For foreign-owned companies in Tianhe we take the whole journey: audit, then tenant and licence design, then cutover, then the settling-in weeks when the odd fault surfaces. The aim is a migration nobody has to talk about afterwards.

What makes M365 backup in Tianhe a different project

Treat the two clouds as different products, because that is what they are. Licences differ, some features behave differently, and performance comes down to how traffic leaves your office and where it joins Microsoft’s network. Then there is the compliance angle: where personal data may legally sit, and what you can hand to a regulator or a head office when they ask.

We audit before anyone touches a mailbox: licence entitlements, domains and DNS, mail flow rules, Teams and SharePoint usage, identity configuration, and which devices are enrolled where. A straightforward tenant move take two to four weeks from audit to cutover.

What we migrate

• Mailboxes, mail flow and shared mailboxes
• Teams, channels and chat history, where the move allows it
• SharePoint and OneDrive content, with permissions checked before and after
• Identity — Entra ID, groups, authentication and conditional access
• Devices and policy, including Intune enrolment
• DNS records, domains, and the licence position on the new tenant

Mailboxes go first and collaboration content follows, so the team keeps working while the rest of the estate catches up.

How the project runs, step by step

1. Establish what you have today against what the business genuinely needs
2. Settle the destination design: tenant, licensing, routing
3. Run a pilot group and record what actually changes for users
4. Cut over in a planned window; we schedule it around your team’s calendar
5. Hypercare — we stay on through the settling-in period, while the small faults surface
6. Leave you with documentation, and keep supporting the estate afterwards

Where we work

We are not a single-city provider. NETK5 dispatches engineers across mainland China: our own team is based in Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou and Hong Kong, and we staff projects elsewhere in the country as clients need them — Xi’an, Chengdu, Taixing and beyond. Outside China we have delivered rack-and-stack work and WiFi surveys in Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, usually for international companies coordinating several sites from a head office that has never been on site.

For M365 backup in Tianhe that matters in a practical way: work can be planned around a visit rather than a relocation, and the same team that surveys or installs can hand over documentation the head office can actually use.

Our experience

Since 2002 we have looked after IT for international companies in China, and Microsoft 365 sits at the centre of most of it. We have run a pilot migration of Microsoft 365 from the global tenant to 21Vianet for a client operating in China, and we manage cloud estates day to day — including an environment of more than thirty Azure virtual machines with Microsoft 365 alongside it. Our clients include names such as Siemens, Nestlé, McKinsey and JLL, usually alongside the international IT companies whose client sites we support.

The questions that come up every time

Do we have to move to 21Vianet if we are in China?

It is a choice, not a requirement. Many foreign-owned companies stay on the global tenant and live with the trade-offs: performance, routing, and how easy it is to evidence how data is handled. We also handle moves the other way, from 21Vianet back to global, when a business restructures or exits. Your users, your regulator and your head office decide it, which is why the audit comes first.

How long are users without email?

With a properly planned cutover, barely: mail flow switches inside a window and everyone signs back in. The slow part is the settling-in — profiles, devices, shared mailboxes, and the occasional Teams channel that surprises you.

Can you support us after the migration?

Yes, and a good share of our migration work becomes ongoing support — helpdesk in English and Chinese, monitoring, and someone who already knows how your tenant was built.

Talk to us about M365 backup in Tianhe

Tell us what you have now and what you need to end up with — tenant, users, sites, and any deadline driving it. We will tell you what the move involves and what it costs before anyone starts.