Migrating to Microsoft Office 365 Exchange Online
Services
- Migration of Microsoft Exchange to Office 365 Cloud
- Best Practices to deploy Office 365
Features
Background
The Dubai World Trade Centre is the epicenter for business tourism in the region and has played a pivotal role in the growth of international trade for the Middle East. DWTC has approximately 1,400 employees and contractors and the diverse, international team is the most important asset and the majority of these employees rely on email communication to complete daily job activities (including many critical processes) making email communication a vital tool for work productivity. As a result, DWTC must have network resources to support email services and critical processes. DWTC operates multiple Microsoft exchange email environments (Staging, Production, and Disaster Recovery (DR) environments).
Microsoft Exchange 2010 is currently used in all environments. These systems will be out of support in 2020.Additionally DWTC Microsoft Environment has the following characteristics:
DWTC has approximately 1500 end user devices that are running Microsoft Windows 7 with Office 2010 and Internet Explorer (IE) browser. DWTC runs two (2) SharePoint 2010 environments, Production and Staging. Each user has an average of 10G on their personal drive, for a total of 14,000 gigabytes in personal drive storage capacity.
DWTC Technology Services Branch seeked assistance of WATI to migrate DWTC to the Microsoft Office 365 services, that include Phase 1 Exchange Online.
Services
WATI analyzed existing DWTC ecosystem to align to suitable Azure services and formulated Azure strategy to align the technology to business goals. WATI provided migration strategy and regulatory guidelines for the existing applications. WATI developed a platform to establish a private cloud infrastructure and took charge of developing underlying platforms for automated self-service portal and private cloud infrastructure. The team led the development of multi- tenant SAS cloud infrastructure platform. WATI demonstrated its technical skills in developing cloud platform, migrating services and network to Office 365. WATI designed and implemented security to isolate each tenant traffic within the private cloud and perform stateful inspection. WATI designed, developed, and implemented Microsoft Exchange Online based messaging systems to ensure uninterrupted electronic communications with applications, users, and clients. WATI implemented and maintained systems and technologies (edge systems, message hygiene, and data encryption) to protect data availability, message confidentiality and integrity.
WATI performed all tasks necessary to fulfill service level agreements regarding Exchange- based messaging and collaboration availability and security; including those involving user accounts, shared folders/calendars, mailing lists, and Outlook Web Access.
- Implement policies, procedures, and technologies to ensure Exchange server security through secure access, monitoring, control, and routine security evaluations. The team further performed the following activities.
- Maintain Security of on premise and cloud based Active Directory infrastructure.
- Experience with Office 365 deployments/migrations including Skype for Business, Outlook and One Drive.
- Specialized knowledge of the Exchange Online application in O365 at an enterprise level, including familiarity of working in a hybrid on-premises and cloud environment.
- Maintain, troubleshoot and provide advanced level assistance for Office 365 applications from a technical perspective.
- Provide O365 Tier 3 support to client community
- Lead an Exchange Service Team to problem solve, collaborate on projects and promote the usage of O365.
Results
Dubai World Trade Center are benefitted with the new solution of Office365 cloud resources. The new solution while continue to provide advantages of space, resources, accessibility and availability in addition provides the flexibility to access latest and cutting-edge tools and technologies with unrestricted reach.