Laughlin Air Force Base, Texas—Technicians began migrating Laughlin email from the Air Force network to the secure commercial cloud July 31, 2018.
The migration is taking place because of an Air Force Space Command directive to realign resources to more critical priorities and outsourcing services such as email.
As a result, the dreaded “your mailbox is full” message is soon to be a thing of the past.
Email is the first of the Microsoft Office 365 services the Air Force is migrating to a cloud-based service. The migration team completed the first Air Force bases this spring and summer, and the remaining continental United States base migrations are underway. Beginning in late summer, users will receive a second cloud-based service, Skype for Business (SfB). Cloud-based SharePoint and OneDrive are also set to arrive this fall.
After running through the migration steps, users will likely not even know they have been migrated to the cloud. Outlook and SfB will look and feel much like the existing Outlook/Lync 2010 service in use today under the standard license. However, they will soon notice an exponential increase of individual email storage capacity. Users who previously had 100 MB mailboxes in the Air Force network will now have 100 GB capacity, plus an additional 100 GB of archive storage, in the cloud. As a result, they will now be able to hold two million normal emails in their mailbox and another two million in their archive. For the typical Air Force user, that’s an increase of 2,000 times the current capacity—or like going from a filing cabinet to an entire warehouse. The new enterprise license broadens SfB capabilities to allow users to share their desktop, an application, or whiteboard with multiple cloud users.
This new cloud-based system will offer greater storage options, along with support for mobile devices and desktops, without compromising strict security requirements while adding redundant power, facilities, and components with a 99.9 percent uptime reliability rating.
As the migration approaches, the 47th Communications Squadron will send e-Advisories with instructions for Laughlin users to print so they will be prepared the morning of the migration. If the migration goes as planned, users will follow these directions and be fully operable in the cloud.
As migration approaches its projected start date, an Air Force Network Integration Center team will work with the 47th CS technicians to prepare to migrate Laughlin AFB’s users. To ensure a smooth transition to the cloud, look for 47th CS generated e-Advisories for additional migration related information.
For more information, call the 47th CS Comm Focal Point at 830-298-4199.