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