Microsoft Exchange migration success for local council

Successful migration to Office 365 results in supported messaging solution and reduced on-premise footprint
Microsoft exchange migration success for local council

The customer

Established in 1974, this UK local authority is the third largest metropolitan district by area in England. It has 69 elected councillors, and has responsibility for delivering public services to over 437,000 county residents.

The situation

  • Reduce footprint of server infrastructure across messaging, directory services and supporting applications
  • Leverage the flexibility of cloud in scale and performance
  • Achieve robust Disaster Recovery (DR) capability
  • Upgrade existing Exchange solution to facilitate the co-existence and migration
  • Achieve federated identity for centralised authentication of Office 365 users and decommission legacy messaging infrastructure

Our approach

  • Design and deploy purpose built Office 365 Exchange platform using Exchange 2013 hybrid deployment
  • Exchange hybrid configuration used to transition legacy to cloud messaging system
  • Documenting legacy environment, identifying areas of remediation and key design decisions that would facilitate and ready the environment for Office 365 service enablement
  • Deploy ADFS v3.0 as the identity provider in a resilient, highly available architecture
  • Deploy Azure AD Connect for directory synchronisation to Azure AD with DR standby

Outcomes achieved

  • Modern supportable messaging solution
  • Improved Exchange platform capable of managing disaster recovery scenarios more efficiently
  • Improved email and calendaring availability for all users
  • Bring your own device (BYOD) supported across the business
  • Reduced on-premise footprint decommissioning of legacy and redundant infrastructure