Our client was looking to simplify and significantly reduce costs on a large and cumbersome Email environment spread across 30 servers. L3C were required to migrate 6,000 users and 40TB of data from this complexity and provide a UK based hosted cloud environment as it was essential that the data remained in the UK. Flexibility, timing and skills were key as there was a critical deadline to meet for the migration while the disaster recovery service needed to be improved to meet new business needs
Challenges
While timeline and meeting the budget were critical, the existing infrastructure hadn’t been cleaned for a considerable time adding to the complexity. There was a vast storage whitespace from deleting users over time without clearing the databases, many users had not been active for some time and there was a significant amount of archiving that was required. Additionally, the Recovery Point Objective for the disaster recovery service needed to be improved to 15 minutes.
How L3C Helped
L3C team of specialists completed the migration on time and within budget. The migration was performed with forensic attention to detail with mailbox by mailbox analysis to avoid unused space. The new environment is hosted in secure UK Tier 3 data centres with full redundancy from communication providers. A new backup solution allows restore at a single mailbox level while the new enhanced DR solution provides the 15 minutes RPO required. L3C’s solution is scalable (upwards and downwards) and is fully integrated with our client’s other cloud solutions providing a truly hybrid cost effective model.
Results, Return on Investment and Future Plans
The new environment is now fit for purpose and runs at a far lower operational costs. Service levels are improved with an improved DR service matching the business needs. Data is secured in Tier 3 UK data centres with level 3 operational support being provided to the client’s local team. For the future an archiving solution is being evaluated that will enable the client to enforce data governance and control email data growth. Additionally, end users will be able to retrieve archived emails without raising a ticket to the service desk.
End Results:
Lower Operational Cost.
Improved Service Levels.
Flexible Platform for Future Growth.
Improved DR Solution.
Platform to enable Future Enhancement.
Let us discuss with you how we could provide a hosted email solution using our UK data centres or provide Office 365 solutions using the Azure platform, protecting your heritage investments while enabling your future.
