TB HIV Care
Office 365 Migration
The Challenge
TB HIV Care is a large non-profit organisation that puts integrated care at the heart of responding to TB, HIV and other major diseases. With 2200 employees and Care and Treatment facilities across nine provinces, IT infrastructure was becoming obsolete.
Rapid organisational growth coupled with maintaining an on-premise Exchange server and associated user licensing, also became costly. Moreover, intermittent load shedding, power outages, ISP and connectivity issues at head office, left all Exchange users nationally offline and without email for extended periods of time.
Without compromising the secure storage of patient and other critical data, TB HIV Care required a solution that would relegate disruptions and reduce operating expenses.
The backup strategy used for the on-premise Exchange would have the server off at least once a month, affecting productivity.
Due to the size of the Exchange environment, backups often ran longer than expected, which in turn, affected the Exchange performance.
TB HIV was already testing out some Cloud components like OneDrive and Sharepoint and wanted further integration like Single Sign-on (SSO) authentication to increase productivity.
The Environment
The Solution
Using the Hybrid process to migrate from on-premise Exchange to Office 365 Online, Silicon Overdrive was able to transfer user information and 600 mailboxes at two separate locations without interruption or exposure to data security vulnerabilities.
Reasons why this is noteworthy:
- The seamless process allowed for live batch migrations of multiple mailboxes to sync at the same time, without affecting users with downtime or mailbox disruptions, considerably reducing the lead time of the project;
The hybrid connector allowed users who were already migrated, to continue effortless interaction with mailboxes that were not – Eg. Calendar sharing, mailbox sharing, contact sharing;
Outlook profiles didn’t require reconfiguration and no profile or user-group recreations were required; - The Hybrid process reduced the number of techs required, and no additional tools or licenses were needed;
- Silicon Overdrive assisted TB HIV Care with the implementation of security policies and managing the Cloud environment, adding further value to the robust security features and reliability of Office 365; and
- Facilitated free/reduced user fees under the NPO/NGO licensing agreement, drastically reducing costs per user.
By deploying Office 365 throughout the organisation in a seamless Hybrid migration, TB HIV Care was able to avoid the considerable capital expense of replacing on-premise hardware and related software.
Our solution not only enabled the organisation to reduce operating costs, increase productivity, and enhance data security, but more importantly, allowed the NGO to divert funds into the core, and critical work they are committed to doing.