IT consultancy extends global employee productivity with data residency compliance

Thousands of companies that want cutting-edge technology without bleeding-edge problems turn to Dimension Data. The Johannesburg, South Africa–based IT services provider helps businesses stay ahead of evolving technology with trusted design, support, and managed services solutions.

Its approximately 28,000 employees work across 46 countries, often at customer sites. A member of the Microsoft Partner Network, Dimension Data frequently implements Microsoft software for customers and uses it internally. To help its highly mobile workforce communicate, work together, and get more done from anywhere, the company deployed Microsoft Office 365, relying on cloud apps like Microsoft OneDrive to let employees sync and share files anytime, anywhere, from any device.

“Having our productivity services in the cloud makes it much easier to move employees around the world to meet project needs,” says Neil van der Merwe, Senior Director of IT Operations at Dimension Data. “When we ran Microsoft Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Skype for Business Server on-premises, it was difficult to migrate inboxes between regions. With Office 365, employees just get on a plane and move, and nothing changes on the technology back end.”

Australian employees marooned on a technology island

However, in the company’s Australian business, employees were stuck with on-premises technology because of government customer requirements that data be stored in the country. Although Microsoft had a datacenter geography (geo) in Australia, Dimension Data had its Office 365 tenant in the Microsoft European Union geo and didn’t want to create a second tenant in Australia, because that would result in two different email aliases across the company.

Consequently, Australian employees could not enjoy the benefits of Office 365, which included the ability to collaborate by sharing documents across global OneDrive resources, using the larger email inboxes that come with Exchange Online, and sharing a single global address list so that employees could find one another easily.

“Not having our 2,500 Australian employees in Office 365 deprived them from fully participating in the rest of the company, and it prevented our other 26,000 employees from including Australian colleagues on their teams,” says van der Merwe. “The Australian business also had to continue managing on-premises productivity infrastructure, which was expensive.”

Bring everyone into the cloud with Office 365 Multi-Geo capabilities

When Microsoft announced the Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365, Dimension Data saw the answer to its problem. Multi-Geo enables a single Office 365 tenant to span multiple Office 365 datacenter geos and give customers the ability to store their Exchange and OneDrive data at rest, on a per-user basis, in their chosen geos. Multi-Geo is currently available for Exchange Online and OneDrive and soon for SharePoint Online and Office 365 Groups.

Using Multi-Geo, Dimension Data can manage a single tenant out of the Microsoft European datacenter geo and flexibly store Australian employees' email, calendar, attachments, and files in the Australian datacenter geo.

“With Multi-Geo Capabilities in Office 365, we’ll solve a massive business issue,” says van der Merwe. “We had no way to move forward with Office 365 in Australia. Now our entire workforce can be part of a single Office 365 tenant and globally collaborate using a single platform. We can use Multi-Geo to give our employees anywhere productivity and our customers robust security—we no longer have to choose one or the other.”

Mark Miller, Chief Information Officer of Dimension Data Australia, adds, “In addition to meeting the data residency requirements for some of our large corporate clients here in Australia, Multi-Geo allows our business to take advantage of the same productivity features as our global colleagues. Being part of one global Office 365 tenant also streamlines intra-region staff transfers, reducing operational overhead and providing a much better experience for staff relocation.”

With Office 365 available to all 28,000 Dimension Data employees, all files, OneDrive folders, and talent are searchable and sharable across the enterprise. “I can find needed expertise faster by using Office 365 intelligent search and discovery,” says Louise Michelson, Technology Adoption Consultant at Dimension Data. “Many of our tech support teams work at customer sites, and being able to give them access to all our company’s content anytime from anywhere lets them solve problems sooner. It’s a huge advantage.”

Save $244,000 by unplugging on-premises infrastructure

Moreover, Dimension Data will save money by eliminating its on-premises productivity infrastructure in Australia. “The savings with Multi-Geo are twofold,” van der Merwe says. “We eliminate the cost of the infrastructure and the datacenter space to house it, and we also eliminate the expense of having engineers manage it. By eliminating our on-premises communications and collaboration infrastructure in Australia, we’ll save USD244,000. Email volumes are always growing, so those expenses would have continued to rise.”

Dimension Data still employs those engineers, to be sure, but it can refocus them on much higher value services than managing email servers. “The less time we spend managing on-premises infrastructure, the more we can focus on things that add value to our business and customers, such as building out new services,” van der Merwe says.

Michelson adds that there’s another, hidden, IT staff savings related to Office 365: employee empowerment. With SharePoint Server, employees needed IT assistance to set up SharePoint sites, which involved a four-to-five-day wait. With SharePoint Online, employees set up their own SharePoint and Teams sites, manage permissions, and tinker around with new ideas—with zero assistance from IT.

“From a productivity perspective, employees can get on with what they’re doing without waiting on IT,” Michelson says. “And in our business, time is money. The quicker we can get a product to market or deliver a service to a customer, the better. It’s a real competitive advantage.”

Dimension Data is taking its Office 365 and Multi-Geo learnings and applying them to its customers, many of whom face the same data residency blockers to global Office 365 deployments. “By using Multi-Geo, we’ve solved a big security and productivity challenge for ourselves, and now we’re helping our customers solve it, too,” van der Merwe concludes. “This increases the value that we provide.”

Find out more about Dimension Data on Twitter and Facebook.