Whilst moving to a cloud platform has a multitude of benefits, it does bring with it considerable technical challenges. It was vital to find a solution that was secure, scalable and future proof whilst minimising any impact to the business. Moreover, in the current working environment, with staff working remotely, managing access and security of a remote workforce was critical. MTech is a Microsoft Gold Partner, so the logical first step for us was to look at Azure and Microsoft 365, Microsoft’s cloud computing platforms. To investigate whether Microsoft Azure was a viable option, we needed to consider all of Answer’s IT business processes and see whether these would migrate to and run within that environment.
Their requirements included:
- Access to Sage
- Secure access to company files and documents
- Maintain their VPN & Wireless Authentication with 802.1x – utilising their corporate credentials
The Solution
Through research and prototyping, we were able to find a way to meet the above requirements. However, a key issue for us was finding a solution in which the migration didn’t require a hard reset (wiping) of each device, as this would have a significant impact on productivity. Unfortunately, the official Microsoft recommended method required this hard reset and this wasn’t a feasible option for Answer. As a result, we had to look at alternative solutions that could seamlessly migrate devices without resetting them. After further research and prototyping we were able to form a solution that allowed us to migrate user profiles and devices from onpremise Active Directory (AD) to Azure Active Directory (AAD) - Microsoft’s enterprise cloud-based identity and access management (IAM) solution.
To prove that this third-party solution would work in practice, we carried out a thorough proof-of-concept project. For this, we used a demo Microsoft 365 tenant as a test environment and focused solely on user and device migration. Through the test environment, we were able to demonstrate migrating users and devices to the cloud without loss of data, keeping the end-user’s profile intact without wiping the device. Satisfied with the results of the test, we were confident that we could then start the process of moving key business systems over to the cloud.