Multi-State Financial Services Company Adds Security, Search and High-Availability in Upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2016

Overview

Our client, a large regional financial institution, requested assistance with a project to plan and implement a new on-premises SharePoint 2016 environment to replace its aging SharePoint 2010 system.

In addition to replacing aging software, our client wanted to improve search, ensure high-availability database capabilities, improve security and compliance, and implement disaster-recovery readiness.

The organization also needed to plan for the future. That meant designing a system that could scale to more than 2.5 terabytes of data and be ready to accommodate a hybrid scenario in which the on-premises system would benefit from certain cloud-based features such as Azure Information Protection.

Solution

We worked closely with several subsets of our client’s internal IT group, including the SharePoint team and the security and compliance team, as well as groups of business stakeholders, particularly in the marketing and communications area, to establish business needs. We analyzed the current state (including pain points) and strategic imperatives. Then, we held a series of directed-design workshops that resulted in a set of functional requirements custom-tailored to our client’s business.

From there, we moved into platform architecture and infrastructure planning for the new SharePoint 2016 environment. We structured the platform to serve our client across its multiple data centers and to be ready to scale to more than 2.5 TB while ensuring high-availability data at each growth stage. Although this was an on-premises implementation—largely for cost and licensing reasons—we ensured the platform would be online-ready.

Along with the technical planning, we also focused on the user experience and interface. We built mockups of what new SharePoint sites could look like after the migration took place. This process embraced both the IT group and also representatives from business lines, who recognized how features in SharePoint 2016 could greatly enhance their users’ productivity on the system. (Previously, on the SharePoint 2010 system, most activity centered around document storage and sharing.)

After building out the new platform, we conducted extensive testing and validation, with a high level of focus on security and compliance features, including at the individual file level.

The Concurrency project team included a technical architect, a SharePoint engineer, a business analyst and a project manager. We conducted workshops onsite at our client’s headquarters facility then proceeded with a mix of onsite and offsite work.

Throughout the project, we helped our client prepare to meet the organization-change demands they would face when migrating data and users to the new system. We trained them on applying software patches and how to actually move the content from the old platform to the new one. We also provided direction on how to integrate Power BI with the new SharePoint platform.

This large-scale project went smoothly throughout planning and implementation, thanks to close collaboration with our client’s internal teams.