Location:
Ukraine
Industry:
Software & Hi-Tech
Specialists:
2,300+
Website:
About the Customer:
Infopulse, part of the leading Nordic digital services company Tietoevry, is an international vendor of services in the areas of Software R&D, Application Management, Cloud & Infrastructure, and Cybersecurity to SMEs and Fortune 100 companies across the globe.
Business Challenge
As an enterprise-level company, Infopulse is required to have a business continuity plan (BCP) in place that would enable the company to quickly respond to risks and address the challenges caused by the external factors that can be neither managed nor controlled. Therefore, in 2016 the management decided to kick off the preparation and rollout of a company-wide BCP procedures. A solid disaster recovery plan (DRP) had to be a part of BCP.
Solution
Our engineers came up with an infrastructure DRP to be implemented in two stages:
- DRP V1.0 with the backup of critical production systems to our European data center – two out of three systems were covered by V1.0.
- DRP V2.0 is an elaboration of V1.0 procedures with fixed issues. In this next version, it was decided to extend the backup to include the project environment and cloud component. Altogether, this would enable data safety across the whole company.
The Infopulse BCP team made significant progress while testing the backup platform for 3 years in a row. In January 2022, they achieved a 100% score with all the systems launched and being fully functional:
2019
2020
2022
Product IT systems, pcs
33
36
46
Test type
Go European DC – Go-back
Go European DC – Go-back
Go European DC – 1 week work – Go-back
Test time, h
11
9
13 + workweek + 6
Time to recover in European DC, h
5.5
3
9
Engineers fully involved
11
11
11
Engineers partially involved
0
4
7
Systems passed, pcs
19
35
46
Systems with problem, pcs
11
1
0
Systems skipped, pcs
3
0
0
Success rate, %
58%
97%
100%
Plan A was to shift the infrastructure to a remote data center in Kyiv. After Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, the engineers had to opt for plan B and move the data center to the one we had earlier set up during DRP V1.0 as a backup within the EU.
Overall, the migration efforts can be summarized as a portfolio of various projects queued for a shift to the cloud:
- Email system: at the beginning of 2019, we started testing the email system with a plan to shift it to Exchange Online as we realized the strategic necessity to move to the cloud or hybrid environment. The reasons were better security and more storage space the cloud solution offers. After a year of successful tests, we initiated the active phase of the email system migration, which was finalized by the end of 2020.
- Replacing Skype for Business with Teams was the next stage of the migration that started in 2020. Now, the migration process is 100% complete.
- At the same time, the BCP team started the process of migrating the internal SharePoint solutions (Infopulse’s intranet and department pages) to SharePoint Online.
- Kyiv data center encryption was a crucial part of the migration scope. Often, this is a core requirement when applying for certain certifications or going through partnership audits.
- Our engineers moved RMS (Rights Management Center) to Azure Information Protection to have all the company documents protected and secured. Now, the global team of Infopulse no longer needs on-premises infrastructure to work with the documentation.
- Finally, the external website of Infopulse was migrated to the cloud as well.
- Azure DevOps is another migration project currently in our backlog. Previously known as Team Foundation Service (TFS), it allows storing code with versioning. The platform consists of two components: an on-premises part (Azure DevOps Server) and a cloud one (Azure DevOps Service).
Before updating or migrating infrastructure services, our team tests everything from A to Z, checking all the possible scenarios. The alterations to be made are subject to change control and management process, including expert-led technical assessment in addition to the opinion of engineers and risk assessment for the company. Automated change control and IT portfolio management are the concepts our engineers use to execute migration endeavors, with each stakeholder having a definite role and responsibility as seen in the table below.
Unit
Role
BCP / Engineering team
- Exploring new concepts & technologies
- A/B testing of migration scenarios
Tech committee
- Evaluating testing results
- Deciding on migration feasibility
Executive Management Team
- Signing off on migration plan and its technological enablers
Oleksandr Pronkin
Technologies
Business Value
For Infopulse, the end-to-end infrastructure migration was critical in dealing with a potential force majeure. At the same time, this project resulted in multi-fold benefits both for the end-users and the company as a whole:
- Secure cloud-based mailboxes with 100 Gb storage capacity per user along with a web interface featuring seamless anywhere-anytime access for 2,000+ users.
- Skype for Business was replaced by Microsoft Teams with our own telephony hub, which is integrated with the latter through Session Border Controller (SBC) to orchestrate telecom providers' integration.
- Reduced learning curve for the end-users with smooth Teams and SharePoint onboarding by conducting pre-migration communication sessions with Infopulse Business Units and creating practical video tutorials.
- Propelled administration and improved security through several initiatives in addition to user-centered projects: implementation of Defender Foreign Point, antiviruses cloud shift, RMS, and Microsoft Intune to better manage the workstations.
- As a result of the BCP team's proactivity, numerous actions taken in the last 6 years, and the implementation of best practices in business continuity, our engineers managed to account for all the possible ad hoc scenarios caused by the military aggression in February-March 2022.
- More than 75% of local specialists that were relocated to safe locations abroad and in the west of Ukraine can access and use our business systems due to successful migration.
- As of April 2022, more than 90% of our experts perform their regular duties as always regardless of whether they are working on-site, in the office, or remotely, and continue contributing to the ongoing projects.
- Because of the war with Russia, our BCP experts had to re-plan the migration of the core data center. The architectural scenario remained unchanged though. Now Infopulse has a hybrid infrastructure that runs like clockwork.
Alexey Sigov
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