Making Operations Modern, efficient and adaptable to demands with cloud services
ABOUT
Titan Technologies has a successful history of supporting clients with varying requirements. One of the areas we specialize in is in providing day-to-day Operations and Maintenance (O&M) support as an extension to our customer’s IT departments. As part of O&M, we initiate projects to integrate new technologies and make the environment flexible, cost effective, and responsive to new demands.
CHALLENGE
Our clients, Montgomery County Government, Okaloosa County School District, and the Maryland Department of Transportation needed to migrate their office productivity services which included office, chat, email, and file shares into the cloud to reduce cost and take advantage of the mobility and high availability features offered by this solution. They also wanted to modernize their disaster recovery capabilities for their directory services and data.
SOLUTION
Working under a compressed timeline, the Titan Technologies team planned, designed, and implemented the Office 365 and email features as an enterprise service available to all end-customers. Adhering to project management principles, we developed a comprehensive project plan, created user stories mapped to each solution feature, established a test environment, and enabled the customer to participate at every step of the project. We started execution by assessing the existing environment to determine feasibility and identify potential bottlenecks as we transition the environment into a hybrid-cloud configuration. According to plan, we iteratively rolled out the different features first to pilot users, then to production groups, gathering feedback, documenting and improving the services each time. We also developed a comprehensive communication and training plan, training more than 10,000 users for each customer organization. Some of the features that were implemented are:
- Office 365 applications
- Skype for Business including SIP trunk conferencing
- Teams
- OneDrive for Business
- Exchange Online
- SharePoint Online
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
- Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)
Titan Technologies, along with its partners, also implemented Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) to provide single sign-on for the entire enterprise for Office 365 services such as OneDrive for Business, Skype for Business, and Exchange Online. Disaster Recovery (DR) was implemented using Microsoft Azure cloud services to enable failover and fallback between the premises and the cloud farm.
RESULTS
By consolidating all departments into one single sign-on instance, regardless of the active directory structure, Titan Technologies was able to provide DR for multiple business-critical applications. Also, because these features are now accessible from the cloud, users can work from any location using any device. Further, our customers were able to classify the different types of users and issue the most appropriate license resulting in a significant cost reduction.
