Activity: International group
With the growing popularity of online services (SaaS – Software as a Service) but also considering the complexity and expense of maintaining on-premises IT infrastructures, more and more companies are thinking about the adoption of fully packaged Office 365 offers.
Our customer, a worldwide services and consulting group, took the decision to extend its IT infrastructure to Office 365 using the hybrid mode.
This enables the conciliation of:
- legal obligations to keep information stored on its own local systems
- flexibility, easy implementation/operation as well as maintenance and cost optimization associated with the use of Office 365
The project started with the setup of an identity federation platform (Active Directory Federation Services based) within a highly available datacentre environment. Then, the e-mail (Microsoft Exchange) and collaboration (Microsoft SharePoint) platforms were the first environments hybridised and migrated to Office 365.
In less than 4 weeks, 1,200 mailboxes were transferred to the cloud in a transparent way for the users.
The most sensitive of them, some 300, remained hosted on the on-premises servers. The two e-mail environments work in full symbiosis.
Furthermore, users’ accounts management and provisioning processes were reviewed in order to be adapted to the new hybrid environment.
The migration was also simplified and automated to its maximum in order to facilitate the onboarding and offboarding of the Exchange Online mailboxes.
Following this first step, this company is now fully committed to moving forward with the adoption of cloud services provided by Microsoft.
They are already thinking about implementing Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Microsoft Intune as well as upgrading its Office 365 to E5 in order to migrate its on-premises Lync + Unified Messaging/Telephony platform to office 365.
All these projects are currently driven by Sword Technologies concerning architecture strategy definitions as well as project and change management aspects.
This type of project highlights the capacity of Sword Technologies to implement cutting edge technologies while performing gradual and user-transparent migrations.
