A large, nationwide insurance carrier wanted to more aggressively leverage public cloud infrastructure and services. As a large Microsoft customer, migrating to the Office 365 SaaS solution was an obvious first step, but migrating on-premise databases and inboxes for 44,000 people into the cloud is a huge technical challenge. SmarTek21 was able to make it painless.
$7M
Migrating Realized $3-5M In SQL Server And SharePoint License And HW Savings, Coupled With An Additional $2M Savings By Eliminating Several Third-Party Tools
44K$
Phased Approach Resulted In No Disruption Of User Or Support Organization, Or Any Temporary Inability To Communicate With Not-Yet-Migrated Colleagues.
3TBD
Migrated Over 3TB Of SQL Server And SharePoint Data Without Incident Or Data Loss.
CUSTOMER CHALLENGE
A large, nationwide insurance carrier wanted to more aggressively leverage public cloud infrastructure and services. As a large Microsoft customer, migrating to the Office 365 SaaS solution was an obvious first step on their cloud journey, but migrating on-premise databases and inboxes for 44,000 people into the cloud is a huge technical challenge.
OUR APPROACH
SmarTek21, a Microsoft Gold Partner, was able to leverage the deep expertise of its Microsoft-certified Cloud Infrastructure practice team to plan and execute the migration from on-premise infrastructure to cloud-based Office 365. Given the desire to avoid disrupting such a large number of users, SmarTek21’s took an approach called “hybrid migration”.
A hybrid migration is the appropriate strategy when dealing environments with on-premises Exchange server, Exchange Online deployed, and their Active Directories synchronized. This migration type assumes that some data is stored on-premises, and the rest in the cloud. The hybrid migration can also be used to gradually migrate all your data to the cloud, maintaining a hybrid environment for the duration of the migration effort. Because hybrid migrations require Active Directory synchronization, it does not matter whether an employee’s mailbox is stored in the cloud and on-premise–all users can have access to shared GAL (Global Address List), calendars, tasks, etc. This is not possible user other migration approaches.
Over 3TB of data were seamlessly migrated. SmarTek21 identified several third-party software products that became unnecessary due to the migration, offering significant additional cost savings.
OUTCOMES
The first step towards a more aggressive adoption of cloud computing was an unqualified success.
- $3-5M in SQL Server and SharePoint license and HW savings
- Removed several third-party tools for an additional $2M savings
- Migrated over 3TB of SQL Server and SharePoint data without incident or data loss.
- Developed a new continuous deployment workflow that vastly improves employee onboarding.