Octavius Infrastructure

Osborne Infrastructure Ltd (OIL) is one of the UK’s leading civil engineering and transport infrastructure businesses, working across rail and highways.
The company was divested from Osborne and acquired by Sullivan Street Partners in September 2021 and became Octavius Infrastructure Ltd in April 2022.

The Need:

Osborne Infrastructure Ltd’s divestiture from Osborne left the company operating as a wholly independent business. The ‘big bang’ nature of the separation put incredible pressure on the small team. Huge quantities of data from almost 30 applications had to migrate over one weekend, ready for the emergence of Octavius Infrastructure Ltd.
The highly time-sensitive nature of mergers, acquisitions and divestitures can leave the business in question in a vulnerable position – incredibly reliant upon the vendors they’ve selected to manage the various elements of the project, and aware that any slippage could impact the share purchase agreement.
With an IT team of just two, no migration experience and little to no back office support, the business was faced with carving out internal resources to manage the project and to ensure every vendor delivered on time and on budget.

Nero Blanco used their excellent PowerSyncPro (PSP) tool to migrate our IT infrastructure from on-prem to the cloud while their PSP Migration Agent efficiently handled the configuring and remote migration of our existing machines at the weekend cutover.
Around 95% of laptops migrated seamlessly with no issue and no downtime for our users. Nero Blanco went above and beyond to quickly fix any issues that were generated by user error, and users were happy and kept informed at all times.
– Dom Lowry, Digital Transformation Manager, Octavius Infrastructure Limited

Choosing the right vendor to manage the migration from on-prem servers to Microsoft Office 365 was essential. All users and data had to be migrated from the previous Osborne tenant to a new, cloud-based, Microsoft 365 tenant.
OIL’s incumbent IT partner provided outsourced helpdesk functionality but had no experience of dealing with migrations. Fortunately, they were aware of Nero Blanco’s reputation as experts in the field of M&A migrations and introduced them to the OIL team.

Migration of the file and folder permissions:

Mailboxes: 4.8TB and 10 million items spread over 639 mailboxes
OneDrive: 4TB and 2 million files spread over 535 ODFB sites
Teams: 83 Teams
Home drives: 4TB, 2.2 million files
Shared drives: 9TB, 6.2 million files
Workstations: 235 Workstations and workloads
iGO application: 2TB, 1.2 million files, 1906 projects

Agreed deliverables:

• Pre-migration auditing and reporting
• Design and solutioning meeting
• Output from kick-off meetings
• Build and configure PowerSyncPro directory sync service
• Check source and target settings to assess likely user impact
• Review Azure AD Connect
• Configure BitTitan MigrationWiz, Mover, and Microsoft Migration Manager
• Single cut-over event
• Seven days’ post-migration support

The Solution:

Nero Blanco scoped and costed the project, and work began in October 2021, with an initial timeline of 10 weeks. Just over 2 weeks in, a due diligence check identified that a complex legacy application – iGo from Deltek (previously Union Square) – hadn’t been included in scope.

With 1.2 million files representing almost 2,000 projects, transferring the 2TB of data from this proprietary document management system was vital.

iGo’s internal customisation would have thrown many IT specialists, but not Nero Blanco. Always keen to get his teeth into a fresh challenge, director and infrastructure architect, Twan van Beers, assessed how the source of the application functioned, where the data was stored, how subsections of data could be imported, and the scripting required to create a bespoke migration engine to import the data.

The team provided a new scope to include iGo and re-engaged with a different timeline.

octaviusinfrastructure.co.uk

Find the full case study here: pdf