THE GREAT MIGRATION TO THE CLOUD

THE GREAT MIGRATION PUT INTO MOTION

When telling the RES cloud transformation story, it is extremely important we highlight that they are based in a country that struggles with good and stable internet thus making cloud transformation a greater challenge. Zwelithini Mdluli the IT Infrastructure and Operations Manager at RES shares, “that the main reason RES preferred on premises Microsoft solutions as opposed to the cloud was due to the poor internet infrastructure within Eswatini, which made the business a little nervous about migrating to cloud.”

Despite this, their desire to embark on this cloud transformative journey never fizzled away and the IT team put together an in-depth proposal for the business to understand the benefits of migrating to cloud. Rob Coombe the Group IT Manager at RES emphasized that the biggest challenges were bridging the gap between the business and the technology, he says “the biggest challenge has been bridging the gap between the technical change and business change, business don’t necessarily look at change as a good thing and bridging that gap has been the biggest challenge. How do we show added value to the business by improving our technology, how do we show value being extracted from our assets using digital technology?”

The team’s reaction to this resistance was to develop a 5-year cloud migration strategy, which was developed in 2020. This was developed working hand in hand with Dimension Data a certified Microsoft Partner who worked with RES on their on-premises Microsoft services. RES reached out to Dimension Data and started consulting and planning the migration to the cloud. Dimension Data are passionate about unlocking their client’s potential while using the Microsoft technology suite of intelligent solutions.

They have a dedicated and extraordinary team that work tirelessly to deliver value to communities across the Middle East and Africa. Their mission is to create smarter businesses for their clients and a better world for everyone. This mission aligns with Microsoft’s mission statement to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Jenny Deyzal Microsoft Licensing Specialist at Dimension Data has been working on the RES account for the last 10 years and she explains how she first received the brief, “I was asked to look at upgrading the Microsoft Office. Many years ago RES had a Microsoft Enterprise Agreement where they had the on-premises technology, and it was now time to upgrade. There were 2 parts to the initial requirement, first we had to look at upgrading Microsoft Office and second we looked at a 5-year roadmap and how Dimension Data can help drive the migration to the cloud. My initial reaction was great RES is looking at moving forward and we want to help our customer drive and achieve their business goals and objectives. This was a good opportunity for Dimension Data.”

THE UPGRADE MADE A REALITY

Looking back, one would say the Covid 19 pandemic was the primary catalyst to this 5-year Cloud Migration Strategy being made a reality a lot earlier than expected. It must be made clear that the IT team were trialing some Microsoft 365 licenses prior to the pandemic. The lockdown imposed on the country caused the RES team to prepare their staff to work remotely, the team had to make the move quickly and as efficiently as possible.

TACKLING THE BRIEF DIRECT APPROACH 

When tackling the brief Dimension Data had to focus on the client goal to upgrade and had to make sure that they approached this goal holistically so to make sure that they were firstly compliant and covered all the services RES were using now. Jenny Deyzel shares how, “going forward we did not only look at the Microsoft Office solution as a standalone but also the Microsoft 365 E3 productivity suite which would give RES access to other current applications that they would need now and in future such as SharePoint, Exchange and Microsoft Teams solutions.”

The migration to the cloud and to the Microsoft 365 suite unfolded in 4 phases:

1. Get the RES team working again 
Equip the team with right services to work remotely from wherever they are. The RES IT team saw great potential in the Microsoft 365 suite, they saw it as a great tool to get work done and collaborate effectively no matter the location. 

2. Increase the License Count 
Once Rob, Zwelithini and the IT team signed off the solution together with the Dimension Data team they had to deploy this suite to the entire organization. Dhillan Kalyan Senior Technical Architect at Dimension Data recalls this phase by saying, “the team at RES were very welcoming in that they gave us remote access to work in their environment. We were then able to setup the active directory AD Sync, getting the user accounts in, building on the cloud, setting up their cloud tenants on Microsoft 365, migrating the users, setting up exchange online, and basically getting their Teams going.” 

3. How to secure this technology 
Safe and secure technology is as important as the functionalities of the technology. Zwelithini Mdluli share how the next step was to secure the software making sure it was safe for remote working. Ensuring the Multifactor Authenticator’s were in check, and finally bringing in document governance and sensitivity labelling. 

4. Deploying OneDrive Storage 
Introducing the team to 1TB storage was a complete game changer as with the on-premises solution storage capabilities were very limiting, and Microsoft 365 equipped the organization to achieve more.

Speaking to Rob Coombe he explains just how fantastic this migration has been for the business, one of the key benefits is collaboration. He mentions that instead of having to drive 17km across the RES estate to have meetings or deliver documents that need signing, Microsoft 365 has taken an organization like RES where collaboration internally and externally was non-existent and brought it to life. 

He says “We don’t have to drive across the estate to meet, we save lots of time and free up time for productivity. Over and above this the collaboration on documents via SharePoint and Teams has been phenomenal, we are now equipped to work on documents simultaneously instead of sending it back and forth waiting for a response. Which has resulted in improved workflows.” 

Microsoft 365 has saved RES huge amounts of money when it comes to storage, instead of relying on the limited capacity they had with the on-premises solution they now had 1TB of storage per tenant. Rob mentions how less pressure has been put on their hard drive space and on their physical servers which in turn has saved the business money.