Texas Research International (TRI) is an Austin-headquartered research and technology firm whose clients include the U.S. Department of Defense, with 10 subsidiaries and global sites in Libya, Egypt, Australia, and across the United States.
TRI's goal: bring all 10 subsidiaries into the same system while still meeting the diverse compliance requirements of each company and client.
20+ years of legacy technology
TRI's environment was Novell, with GroupWise as the email client, in place for more than 20 years and causing real problems: internal technology management struggles, and above all, compliance. Managing individual environments for global sites was time-consuming, and as their IT director put it, it's hard to troubleshoot a router in Australia when they're 14 hours ahead.
“From my perspective, they've saved a ton of time and money because they were able to really hit the ground running instead of spending a month trying to figure it out.”
Ten subsidiaries into two tenants
CloudServus set up two tenants: a Government Community Cloud High (GCC High) tenant meeting DOD and federal cybersecurity requirements for defense work, and a second tenant for everything else. TRI chose CloudServus in part because the team had recently migrated roughly 26,000 people out of GroupWise for a large state court system.
All of TRI's systems then moved from Novell to the two Office 365 tenants, with CloudServus handling endpoint management setup, environment creation, and step-by-step migration instructions. Engineers were directly reachable daily, a project manager ran weekly meetings, and after-hours and weekend work never went unanswered, including 11:30pm phone calls.
“Getting everything consolidated into a single management interface under a single umbrella was definitely beneficial.”
Government-grade compliance, global collaboration
With the migration complete, the compliance issues that had been eating TRI's lunch were largely resolved:
- One system, two tenants. All of TRI's systems migrated into two Office 365 tenants, improving efficiency and simplifying user and device management.
- Global collaboration unlocked. Cloud data integration made it dramatically easier for global sites to share data with Austin HQ, ending the time-zone battle.
- Compliance resolved. Live reporting simplified ISO compliance, inventory problems disappeared, and DOD-grade security requirements were met through GCC High.
- Infrastructure simplified. VPN tunnels removed and expensive, failure-prone international infrastructure dismantled.
TRI keeps a monthly retainer with CloudServus for whatever pops up next.
“For what we were doing, the skill level and talent of the engineers and even the project manager were night and day above any of the other folks that I have talked to.”