Nationwide Finance company, with several hundred employees across 6 office sites.

Having taken on Time Finance’s subsidiary companies, Prestige IT was tasked with unifying their existing local domains. These local domains had the following challenges:

• 6 disparate sites on 6 different local domains
• Local file access
• Limited collaboration and file sharing ability
• Reliance on site-to-site VPNs for any sort of file sharing
• Reliance on on-site servers and equipment
• Not leveraging their full Office 365 potential
• On premises line of business apps were unable to be migrated easily or cheaply and had local domain authentication
• Disparate policies, no unified corporate branding / screensavers

We were tasked with deploying a solution to these challenges over the course of 6 weeks with minimal disruption to the staff. Working with Time Finance’s head of I.T David Jones, we architected a full network overhaul and operated out of hours, migrating all the staff and offices in the proposed timeline with minimal disruption.

We deployed a Hybrid AD and AAD (Azure Active Directory) environment, federating a local unified domain that had a two-way trust with the legacy domains, this allowed the users to be migrated to AAD while retaining access to their legacy LoB (line of business) apps without interruption or cost to their LoB maintainers to move.

With AAD we are able to leverage Intune to centrally roll out Cyber+ approved security and policies.

The smaller LoB apps were migrated to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) for access across the Estate from any compliant AAD machine.

For File access we migrated the on-premises files to SharePoint libraries, assisting the staff with creating a logical repository for their data and attaching the end-users to it with the OneDrive client.

Without the reliance on being in the office the staff are able to work anywhere with internet, or even cache files for offline use, allowing them to open company data without access to the web.

To Summarise the new environment and its benefits:

• Hybrid AD / AAD environment
• Two-way trust between new AD/AAD environment and legacy domains for uninterrupted access to line of business applications
• AVD environment for cloud-based access to LoB apps that were able to be moved
• Full Intune management of all devices and conditional access policies
• Application proxy for conditional access to internal web-based apps from anywhere
• Universal print for printing to any geo printer without being on the same network
• Unified policy with Cyber+ approved settings such as mass storage lockdown, screensaver time outs, wallpapers, homepages and screen savers consistent throughout the company
• Bitlocker device drive encryption with keys stored in AAD
• Conditional Access, prescribed device list adding an extra level of multi-factor authentication

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