NCSoft has operated in the video game industry for over 20 years, producing franchises including Guild Wars and Lineage. Headquartered in Seoul, South Korea, with global divisions, its customer-facing infrastructure was already entirely cloud-based, and it wanted its corporate infrastructure to match.
A global company, divided
Three NCSoft units, ArenaNet, NCSoft West, and NCSoft headquarters, operated on separate Microsoft 365 instances, creating severe coordination problems. Single sign-on across tenants was impossible, security monitoring was manually intensive, and a Dallas data center added expensive overhead.
“Every week, we found ourselves grappling with issues to maintain connectivity between the two sides. The process was arduous at the user level, necessitating two versions of Microsoft Teams to be open concurrently.”
The merger nobody else would take
No other vendor had experience managing the single-byte to multi-byte language transition required to migrate a Korean-language base instance. CloudServus started with a deep investigation of NCSoft's technical infrastructure, culture, data ecosystem, and workloads, then ran an eight-step migration process with international workshops connecting CloudServus, NCSoft's U.S. stakeholders, and the South Korean IT team.
“We picked CloudServus because they were the only firm willing to take on the task. Nobody else had any experience doing this single-byte language to multi-byte language transition because the base instance in Korea is in Korean. This was a project that a lot of the other vendors were not interested in at any price.”
Six months of prep, one weekend of cutover
NCSoft had limited ability to pilot the full tenant merger, so the cutover had to work the first time. CloudServus closed user access on a Friday afternoon and reopened at 8am Monday morning, landing six months of preparation in a single weekend.
“We shut the doors Friday afternoon to our user base and opened it again at 8am Monday morning. Between those two mileposts, CloudServus was with us the entire time.”
A global company, united
Merging the Seoul and U.S. tenants created a single, cohesive cloud environment:
- Connectivity tooling eliminated. No more maintaining tools to bridge separate Microsoft 365 instances.
- IT, security, and help desk burdens reduced. Streamlined processes and a smaller monitoring footprint relieved team pressure.
- Cost efficiencies unlocked. Redundant licenses eliminated and better discounts accessed through the larger combined organization.
- One identity, one conversation. Company-wide SSO and a single Teams environment ended the historical cultural division.
- Future-ready. Momentum established for continued Azure migration, with a reduced data center footprint cutting cost and carbon.
“Now that we are all in one space we can access everybody's chat together. It's amazingly more simple to be able to communicate with everybody. That's not just IT, that's literally everyone in the company.”