About Sherif Alghali
The IT side of mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures
About Me
When a business is bought, sold, or spun out, somebody has to separate the IT. That is the work I do. I take a business unit out of its parent company's systems and stand it up on its own, or fold an acquired company into the buyer, and I own the part of the deal where employees either can or cannot do their jobs on Monday morning.
Deal timelines do not move because the migration is hard. Transition service agreements expire, closing dates are set by lawyers, and the separation has to land inside a window somebody else chose. My job is to make that date hold without the business finding out how it happened.
Most of what I write here comes from projects that did not go perfectly. Migrations are disruptive, and the useful part is usually what went wrong and what I would do differently. I have worked on more than eighty of them, and the ones I learn the most from are the ones I would not call a success.
I am also a Microsoft Certified Trainer, which is where the writing habit comes from. The best way to understand something is to have to explain it to someone else.
When I'm not immersed in the world of cloud technologies and IT infrastructure, you'll find me traveling to new destinations, getting lost in a good book, or expressing my creativity through writing. I share stories and tips from my travels at Random Travel Notes.
What I Am Accountable For
• The Day 1 date holds, and the deal is not waiting on IT
• Employees sign in Monday morning and get to work
• Nothing critical is left behind in the seller's environment
• The support desk is not buried in the first week
• The company that comes out the other side is more secure than the one that went in
How That Gets Done
• Microsoft 365 tenant-to-tenant migrations and business unit carve-outs
• Google Workspace to Microsoft 365 migrations
• Active Directory domain separation, identity cutover, and device migration
• Email, file, and application moves, and the mail routing change on cutover night
• Discovery, cutover planning, and post-migration support
• Microsoft Entra ID security posture, before and after the separation
Certifications
Microsoft Expert Level Certifications
• Microsoft 365 Certified: Administrator Expert
• Azure Solutions Architect Expert
• Cybersecurity Architect Expert
Microsoft Specialty Certifications
• Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty (AZ-140)
Microsoft Associate Level Certifications
• Azure Network Engineer Associate
• Azure Security Engineer Associate
• Azure Administrator Associate
Other Professional Certifications
• Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT)
My Mission
To write down what actually happens during a migration, including the parts that go wrong, so the next engineer who inherits a carve-out or a tenant cutover has something better than vendor documentation and guesswork. Every article here comes from a real project, with the limits stated plainly.