What Is Office 365 Throttling and How to Prevent It?

Many businesses have started adopting cloud solutions for their operations. These are managed services that are provided by vendors like Microsoft that have developed massive infrastructure to support millions of users. Think of Office 365/ Microsoft 365. As a fully managed service, several users are accessing the services and applications simultaneously, and it is Microsoft’s responsibility to ensure that users across the globe do not experience performance issues. It has put in place various safety measures such as throttling that ensure that the infrastructure is capable of handling volume spike and other black swan events. Let us look at what Office 365 throttling is and how you can prevent it from affecting your performance.

What Is Office 365 Throttling?

All cloud applications, including Office 365, reside on servers. As with most servers, applications and services rely on SQL queries or calls from client machines to servers to access resources on them. This results in the consumption of memory and power.

Some tasks such as Office 365 data migration, backups, searches are resource-intensive. Since it is difficult to predict sudden spikes in call volumes, Microsoft deploys mechanisms like load balancing and throttling on their servers to ensure that there is an equitable distribution of loads and resource consumption to prevent server crashes.

How Does Microsoft 365 and Office 365 Throttling Work?

There are three primary throttling mechanisms for ensuring security and maintaining service availability.

• User Throttling in Office 365/ Microsoft 365 Migration

  Many Microsoft 365/ Office 365 migrations are performed using third-party tools. These tools use client access protocols like Remote Procedure Call (RPC) over a Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) connection for migrating from other platforms to Office 365. This type of throttling is the most restrictive of the three types and easily impacts at the application level.

• Migration Service Throttling with Microsoft 365/ Office 365

  Migration service throttling applies to IMAP migration, cutover migration, staged migration, as well as hybrid migrations. It is designed to manage the number of mailboxes and other components that are being migrated in parallel. Users can exercise a certain level of control over this type of throttling by optimizing the batch sizes of mailboxes and other settings.

• Resource Health-Based Throttling in Microsoft 365 and Office 365

  Resource-based throttling is the least likely of the three methods that could affect performance. It is put in place to ensure that critical service operations and service availability are not hampered for end-users. In most cases, migrations are paused until normalcy is restored in performance levels, and service levels are above threshold limits.

How to Prevent Office 365 Throttling?

There is no silver bullet to prevent Office 365 throttling during migration as much of it is controlled by Microsoft. Here are some steps that can be taken to minimize its possibility.

• Ensure that your migration schedule is well spaced out.
• Minimize the number of versions to back up and restore to reduce the number of calls, thereby the chances of throttling.
• Run tests before performing the actual migration.
• If the test results are unsatisfactory, reduce system load by offloading non-critical tasks and users.
• Add hardware resources if the migration is slower than acceptable levels.
• Distribute account migration list across multiple servers to optimize throughput based on server resource availability.
• Avoid other resource-intensive tasks while the migration is in progress.
• Cross-check the throttling policy that applies to the platform from which you are migrating.
• Optimize the migration concurrency when batches have to be created.

Apps4Rent Can Help with Office 365 Migration

Office 365 and Microsoft 365 throttling are challenges that can be overcome by using the right combination of tools and expertise. As a Tier 1 Microsoft CSP, Apps4Rent has performed tens of thousands of migrations from platforms such as G Suite, Rackspace, Enterprise Vault, and even from on-premises file servers to Office 365 in its 17+ years of experience. Talk to our Office 365 experts who are available 24/7 via phone, chat, and email for Office 365 migration assistance.