A combination the 2020 Problem (Microsoft making a number of their Operating Systems end of life) fast approaching as well as some ageing hardware, meant that Drove understood that as part of their technology roadmap an infrastructure refresh was required. As a large veterinary organisation with a hospital providing 24/7 facilities to clients as well as 6 additional branch sites, downtime was simply not an option.
After discussion with Drove it was decided the refresh was to include:
- Improvement of the security facilities to help demonstrate their commitment to cyber security for both customers and suppliers. (Cyber Essentials and GDPR);
- Relocation of all newly integrated infrastructure centrally at the main hospital. With this in mind the existing business grade FTTC connectivity needed to be re-reviewed due to the proposed increase in traffic from all external branches;
- Looking at options of either implementing a new Exchange Server to replace the existing Small Business Server (which had Exchange included) or review other alternate options;
- An upgrade of the existing backup solution with a fully managed disaster recovery solution which would provide faster recovery times, greater resilience in the event of a disaster as well as enhanced offsite protection and ransomware readiness;
- A review of all existing documentation and roll out a set number of policies to help prepare Drove for the impending GDPR.
The core of the solution was building a central infrastructure which would be managed and controlled via the main hospital, this meant implementing multiple new high powered servers with a SAN to provide a HA (Highly Available) infrastructure; migrating from the existing Citrix Xenserver environment to Microsoft’s HyperV hypervisor, upgrading the existing Microsoft SQL server to SQL server standard (due the RoboVet application reaching the limits outlined within the free version) and critically, integrating an improved fully managed leased line at the main hospital to help manage the proposed traffic for implementing all core equipment at the main hospital
Next we began to roll out brand new Ubiquti networking infrastructure across all sites to help centrally manage, monitor and defend against modern cyber threats. This included the new guest wifi facility with Facebook guest check in across all sites and Implementing a Datto SIRIS device to protect the complete DVH environment as a whole which would be fully managed and provide both local and offsite protection;
We then migrated the local Exchange server environment across to Microsoft’s Office 365 platform as well as migrating all users across to the new Microsoft Server 2016 domain controller.
Finally, we rolled out new documentation as well as applying policies system wide e.g. firewall, password, patching ,monitoring policies etc, and once all users had been successfully migrated across to the new infrastructure we decommissioned the existing infrastructure.
