The Remit

Stem Systems managed the IT infrastructure for a renewable energy plant whose parent investment company operated several similar plants across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Each plant operated its own IT function supported by separate local providers. Stem Systems were chosen to take on the IT management of all plants and HQ starting with a 6-month project to onboard, overhaul, merge and standardise the systems into a single supportable package.

Considerations

• Aging servers of mixed hardware brands and often out of manufacturer’s warranty
• Critical services hosted on hardware that was often under-equipped and with no immediately accessible backup/recovery options
• User data hosted on a mixture of server shared drives, Onedrive shares, Sharepoint sites and other cloud services
• A total of 8 separate Microsoft 365 tenancies and 120 mailboxes needed merged into a single managed environment.
• Familiarity for users – business-as-usual on changeover day for each plant was paramount
• Mixture of broadband providers, network switching hardware and ongoing un-resolved IT issues all needed attention

Implementation

It is always a challenge to inherit a new environment and be tasked with such overhaul and migratory work on day one. Stem Systems take a ‘measure twice, cut once’ approach in all such projects to carefully scope all customer processes and ensure users are productive during and after changeover.

Over a 6-month timeframe –

• All sites surveyed, key staff and critical hardware identified; detailed inventory produced and a hardware proposal drafted.
• Background migrations of all data carried out into parent company tenancy, comprising Azure servers, Exchange mailboxes, Sharepoint libraries and Azure SQL databases.
• Sites re-visited in turn for switchover days, standardised firewalls/network switches/WiFi installed. Most sites required interconnectivity with SCADA and PLC networks on site, needing the transfer of 5+ other VLAN’s (separate internal networks) on each site.
• All client devices dis-joined from current servers and migrated to InTune, allowing cloud-based management of devices independent of location and removing need for VPN’s.
• Key on-site applications e.g. weighbridge, parts management, ERP and scheduling software all migrated to new Azure Virtual Desktop platform and on-site servers removed.
• Microsoft Teams Voice extensions added to extend out the existing HQ telephony estate.
• 250+ DNS records across 12 domain names merged into a single managed platform without downtime of email delivery or website availability.