The Project

Our customer, who are a London based property management company with a number of regional locations that manage a prestigious portfolio of business properties in major cities around the UK, initially engaged us to facilitate a workshop in order to help them define the strategic direction they should take with their IT infrastructure. They had already made the decision to move their messaging and collaboration services to the cloud, and needed to make sure their remaining infrastructure was also upgraded in order to meet the requirements of their growing business. One of the main challenges was that, due to the age of their existing equipment, our customer had set themselves a fairly aggressive timescale to perform the migration and needed to make sure it happened seamlessly and with minimal disruption.

The Process

We initially conducted a requirements gathering exercise and then worked with the customer to understand their current Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). A proposal was then provided which gave high level designs of both on premise and cloud-based solutions which were used to make the decision on which path they wished to take. In keeping with the strategy they had set themselves to use cloud services wherever possible, they chose the private cloud solution.

Based on this decision a detailed discovery of the customer’s entire infrastructure was performed and a detailed design and project plan was produced for the proposed solution. Once accepted an implementation and project team was assembled to carry out all of the work required to complete the project successfully.

There were numerous important prerequisites that needed to be met, such as an upgrade to Active Directory services, the upgrade of the internal LAN infrastructure and firewalls, and the provision of diverse resilient links to the new datacentre. In parallel with this work, a fully replicated, resilient and scalable private virtual cloud was built in readiness for migration of the customer’s on-premise servers.

Migration took place over a period of approximately 6 weeks, upon which the legacy infrastructure was powered down and decommissioned.

The last phase of the project was to perform performance testing against a pre-agreed acceptance criteria, and tuning of the main line of business applications, upon which the customer was happy to sign off the project.