The Southern Nevada Health District (SNHD) aimed to modernize its IT environment while staying within budget. By partnering with us, they seamlessly migrated to Microsoft 365.
The Challenge
As a government agency, SNHD was faced with limited financial resources to upgrade the hardware and software that made up their on-premises IT infrastructure.
“We wanted to move forward from Office 2007, but we didn’t have software assurance on any of our Microsoft applications so we would have to buy new Office, SharePoint, and Exchange licenses,” said Jason Frame, IT Manager for SNHD. “At the same time, we felt we could realize financial, operational, and collaboration efficiencies by moving to the cloud and creating an enhanced modern workplace for our 500 users.”
Maintaining and supporting the existing infrastructure had become increasingly difficult. The organization wasn’t able to take advantage of the newer Office features including Microsoft’s updated security offerings. They also wanted to improve their SharePoint experience which was operating with 2003 and 2007 versions.
Arctiq (formerly DynTek) was an established vendor for SNHD, having built out the organization’s infrastructure and supporting them with several network administration projects. As a Microsoft Cloud Service Provider (CSP), Arctiq was in a unique position to help SNHD with their challenge.
“We had experience with Arctiq and decided to leverage their expertise as a CSP to help us with a go-forward plan,” said Frame.
The Solution
Arctiq began by conducting an evaluation comparing the cost to upgrade SNHD’s on-premises Exchange 2007 vs. migrating to a modern workplace implementation with Office 365 in the cloud. The analysis revealed that SNHD could save 15-38 percent with a move to the Office 365 model and they could also take advantage of a $9,000 Microsoft rebate. The organization decided to move forward with the migration.
“We spent a great deal of time designing and planning a phased approach to the rollout,” said Frame. “We knew with nearly 500 users we couldn’t install everyone at once because of the time it would take to migrate all the information from the old system. We also knew we wouldn’t be able to support going live with that many users at one time.”
Arctiq built out the new Office 365 tenant and set up a phased, off-hours implementation schedule.
The Arctiq and SNHD team rolled out the new system in seven weeks with no down time. Employees would go home at night after doing a full day of work and the project team would then migrate the email and Office applications for 25- 30 users to the new version.
“The employees would log in the next morning and SNHD IT staff would be there to make sure everything was working right for them,” said Frame. “We never missed a beat and that was the key for us.”
“It would have been very expensive for us to do that on our own since we would have had to either pay overtime or shift work schedules around and then not be able to cover what we were doing normally during the day,” said Frame.
Arctiq helped enhance the SNHD’s modern workplace by populating their tenant with additional Microsoft solutions around Project and Visio. They are also looking to incorporate Microsoft’s Advanced Threat Protection solution as well to enhance their security with features from the Office 365 E5 suite.
The Arctiq team also installed and integrated a Cisco telephony system with the features of Skype for Business. In order to do that, they needed to deploy several AudioCode solutions such as Session Border Controllers on the edge.
Finally, Arctiq built out an Azure instance for the organization and populated and mirrored their entire Active Directory structure. They now have a complete redundant disaster recovery (DR) solution in the cloud for their entire directory structure and all of the domain controller environment.
The Results
The migration to the cloud and move to the modern workplace has enabled the organization’s users to enjoy a state-of-the-art workplace with improved collaboration capabilities. In addition, the organization has enhanced its security profile and has ensured it has business continuity with its cloud disaster recovery solution.
The migration was projected to save SNHD 40 percent in the first year and 14 percent for the following years compared to the costs of an on-premises upgrade. Being on Office 365 also provides SNHD with cost flexibility when it comes to licensing.
“A key benefit of going with Arctiq as our CSP is that we don’t have to have a guaranteed spend so we’re only paying for what we are using,” said Frame. “That allows us to be extremely agile with our workforce. As people come and go, we can work quickly with Arctiq to add or remove licenses as needed. In the last 16 months, we have increased our license count by over 15%, while minimizing costs with agile provisioning. With CSP, we are able to provision licenses instantly and get escalated support through Arctiq’s premiere support, making it much faster, easier and cost effective than our previous licensing model.”
SNHD has improved customer service since employees can now get to their email anywhere which wasn’t always possible with the old system. Also, Office is upgraded automatically so the organization doesn’t have to worry about security issues due to unpatched software.
“The entire experience has been very positive,” said Frame. “Arctiq has worked with us really well. They are very responsive and are willing to help us out with any issues or questions we have.”
SNHD is looking to expand its relationship with Arctiq in the future as they consider implementing Desktop as a Service and building out their Azure environment to take advantage of more cloud-based applications.
“We are going to be depending on Arctiq to help us with that buildout,” said Frame. “We’re always looking for other ways to continue to grow our relationship and utilize Arctiq for more things.”
