The customer
This pharmaceutical customer has operations across Europe with 20,000 computers and users.
The problem
The customer had expanded through acquisition and all business units were using different Active Directory domains at varying levels of support and function. As a result, Active Directory policies were separately maintained creating fragmentation across the group in terms of configuration. This directly resulted in inefficiencies in deploying new configurations, reporting on compliance, and integrating with applications that required Active Directory.
The challenge
The customer had decided on a target Active Directory with a single Forest and single Domain for the entire group.
The first challenge was defining a target Active Directory configuration and support model that would meet the requirements of the group.
The next challenge was how to migrate existing users and computers to the new Active Directory.
The solution
Peerless IT was responsible for establishing the programme of work for defining the Active Directory configuration, defining the support model, defining the migration processes, and commencing the first migrations.
The Active Directory configurations was focussed on developing a central Active Directory with appropriate local delegation. As such, the configuration of security groups, Organisational Units, and Group Policy Objects to support a role based delegation model was defined.
Finally, a cross forest Active Directory migration process was defined with a range of internal IT staff and external consultants. The migration process acknowledged the requirements for a period of co-existence across both existing and new Active Directory environments, including consideration for AD dependent applications such as Microsoft Exchange.