Customer Overview
Cavpower is one of South Australia’s largest privately-owned companies and has been the dealer for the supply, service and maintenance of Caterpillar equipment in SA and Broken Hill since 1972. They provide equipment sales and product support to the mining, quarry, local government, building/heavy construction, power generation, industrial services, petroleum, road transport, waste management, forestry and marine industries.
Business Situation
Cavpower self-manage the majority of their ICT in-house. The company’s infrastructure is largely centralised with core servers and infrastructure hosted on–premises at their head office. As the first stage of readiness for a replacement ERP, Cavpower commenced a strategy to simplify its infrastructure and user environment. This included resolving aging infrastructure and a desktop fleet operating on Windows XP that was approaching end of life, meaning eventual loss of desktop application support and security. With end of support earmarked for April 2014, Cavpower needed to upgrade the entire desktop environment to mitigate risk going forward.
Solution
Cavpower’s MIS team presented a strategy for modernising infrastructure in the organisation that would provide a stable platform needed for future growth of the business. Kloud assisted Cavpower with the delivery of this strategy, specifically around the reforms of desktop and server infrastructure.
Kloud identified an opportunity for Cavpower to leverage a mix of cloud-based solutions, freeing time and resources for the organisation to focus on activities core to their business. A prerequisite to any modernisation of the necessary activities was a review of their active directory domain. A comprehensive assessment was conducted to determine suitability and identify any immediate concerns.
Part of simplifying Cavpower’s current infrastructure included a clean-up of their Active Directory (AD) environment, including the hardware used and the removal of virtual machines which were no longer in use. Cavpower’s desktop fleet SOE was also upgraded to improve configuration and server management. A Windows 7 based SOE was developed and deployed using Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2012 R2.
Moving to Office 365 will free up existing storage relieving capacity constraints as well as reducing the need to administer on-premises Exchange servers. Office 365 will also to enable greater collaboration amongst Cavpower’s distributed workforce via Sharepoint and Lync Online.
Benefits
Throughout the engagement, Kloud identified opportunities to:
- Bolster security
- Improve efficiencies
- Automate delivery of applications
- Minimise administrative overheads
- Reduce complexities associated with ageing infrastructure
Cavpower is now able to reap the benefits of migrating to Office 365 which will improve storage space and reduce overall complexities with server configurations and email for users moving forward.
Kloud’s detailed approach allowed us to identify all of the potential issues before embarking on a high risk project that would impact every user in the business. Their collaborative style and flexible approach to project management allowed for a seamless integration of the project into our day to day operations with minimal disruption. We forecast a long and successful partnership with Kloud. – Joanne Jones, Manager Operations Support, Cavpower