Batein

Team Size

3

About it

This one is going to be a little long. So while working for the Fujitsu in-house project, I was also simultaneously working on infrastructure migration of Tokio Marine from On-prem to cloud. Tokio marine had multiple regions / branches of which we managed the migration of Tokio Marine Asia (TMA), Tokio Marine Insurance Singapore (TMIS), Tokio Marine Life Thailand (TMLTH), Tokio Marine Insurance Vietnam (TMIV), Tokio Marine Insurance Malaysia (TMIM), Tokio Marine Life Insurance Malaysia (TMLM), Tokio Marine Indonesia (TMI), Tokio Marine Life Insurance (TMLI), Tokio Marine Safety Insurance Thailand (TMSTH). The migration project was performed one region at a time which took few months for each.

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It wasn't a big team, Just one architect with 2 technical engineers including me. So here I gained hands-on experience on the following:

1. Discovery:

  - Discovered the infrastructure, networking and Active Directory topology of every region.

  - Discovered the current mail flow of all regions and their corresponding mail gateway configurations.

  - Fetched information of all users in the company.

  - Fetched info on total mobile devices and client machines and servers along with Office application versions.

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2. Design:

  - Once we had the Assessment complete, we prepared our migration plan which was in 2 stages i.e. High Level Document (HLD) and Low Level Document (LLD).

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  - HLD consisted of top overview /design of all the features we will introduce and the process we will follow where-as LLD contained the deep dive information on configurations and snapshots of every service under scope i.e. Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint, Yammer, Security & Compliance Center, One Drive, Intune, Azure AD and ADFS.

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3. Deploy:

  - We deployed each service at a time but before that we ensured we had the supported server versions installed or upgraded in the environment. Customers were on Server 2012 R2 and we helped them deploy and configure Window Server 2016.

  - Starting with Exchange, having all the information handy (Current config, DNS Records etc.) we deployed a new exchange server for our HCW and Hybrid and then performed the setup.

  - Once done, we started with began the migration in batches of 100 users per batch.

  - We also ensured, by the time the user migrations were completed, the local desktop team had installed or upgraded the Office versions to Office Pro Plus or Office 2016.

  - Having done with Exchange, we migrated SharePoint from 2013 to SharePoint Online using SharePoint migration tool provided by MS.

  - We also configured ADFS from scratch and deployed and configured WAP for users to be able to authenticate from external networks. Along with that, we configured the Conditional Access Policies on Azure AD for specific user sets i.e., IT, HR, Finance etc. and this included configuration of DLP policies.

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4. Deliver:

  - As a part of the process, we also ensured step was documented and hence we captured all configuration into snapshots that was shared over PDF and Documents.

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5. UAT Testing:

  - Before starting the migration for all users, we migrated the regional IT team to cloud and performed testing to ensure all features were working as expected and that it was signed off by the customers.

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6. Post-migration support:

  - We provided users support for as per the contract after they were migrated.

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This process was followed for all the other GCs as mentioned above and then it was a start of another BAU support project.

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Below were the responsibilities in the BAU support project:

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1. Assist with Exchange Online, Teams, SharePoint Online, Yammer, Azure AD.

2. We also managed and maintained the Exchange, AAD Connect and ADFS server and this included patching and server upgrades. All changes performed were as per the ITIL process and Service Now platform was used for the same.

3. Perform changes to the tenant wide configurations of various services like Conditional Access, MAM and MDM policies and upgrade minimum mobile device versions to make them compliant with latest company's policies.

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Additional Notes

There was a time when our customers were attacked by Ransomware malware and we had sleepless nights for a month. Since the servers were backed up every day, they were backed up to the last best version and then everything was reconfigured and bought up to working. This is where I understood why Disaster Drills are crucial in an environment. Hence, I also have gained experience on perform DR activities for Exchange Servers. 

Alongside, I was also actively involved in technical hiring for Fujitsu and have interviewed approx. 150+ candidates ranging from freshers to Technical Architects

Skills Gained