The following case study dives into how the products section of a construction company were split and acquired by a third party, thus producing two separate companies. This resulted in the need of splitting the infrastructure of their IT systems.
The Challenge
This section of the business that produced building products was once part of the main construction company. As both parts of the business grew, they divided into two separate companies though both shared the same infrastructure. The products section of the business was eventually sold to a third-party, this therefore necessitated the split of the infrastructure.
The combined infrastructure consisted of servers in Azure, Microsoft 365 for email and Teams and a SAP instance hosted by a SAP provider in AWS. A VPN from the SAP Providers AWS infrastructure to the offices allows for printing from SAP.
Both companies shared the same office for the first six months.
The Solution
It was decided that the products side of the business would not be using any servers in their new configuration. Emails would remain in Microsoft 365. Files were moved to SharePoint as most files were office documents which provided versioning and collaboration. There were capabilities they did not have before. Devices would continue to use Autopilot & Intune for enrolment, configuration, and management.
The existing on-premises network would need to be split to accommodate the two separate companies. A new Microsoft 365 tenant was created for the construction company. The tenant was configured, and the prestaging was started. The emails were migrated by leveraging Microsoft’s new ability to perform a tenant-to-tenant migration. SharePoint Migration Tool was used to copy files from the server to a newly created SharePoint library.
Existing Intune and Group Policies were rationalized and reconfigured in the new tenant. The hardware hash for each client machine to be migrated was obtained and ready to be imported into the new tenant. The existing network in the main office was split into VLANs and the additional VPN to SAP in AWS was configured.
On the weekend of the agreed switchover, final syncs were performed for emails and files. Client PCs were reset, removed from the product side of the business on AutoPilot and added to the Autopilot of the construction company. Once this was done the client PCs were enrolled and configured.
The Outcome
Both companies now have separate IT infrastructure and are currently sharing the same office without issue. Our client was very pleased with the professionalism of the work carried out. The speed at which it was implemented meant that both companies could continue with minimal disruption while the split in their infrastructure took place.