Educational Publisher

About the Business

This educational publisher provides quality, engaging educational content in digital and print formats by delivering books, magazines, and educational programs directly to schools and families through print, audio, television, film, and digital applications.

The Business Challenges

In 2012 the company was hit by Hurricane Sandy, losing power to its data center and all email in the aftermath of the superstorm. The downtime was unacceptable to the company, and it was determined to find a solution independent of a single data center in order to avoid this type of failure in the future and to ensure the highest quality of service to its customer base. As a forward-thinking, progressive business, the publisher believed the solution was in the cloud. Its goal was to migrate its 6,000 plus users and 300 shared mailboxes from its on-premises environment to Office 365 before another natural disaster could threaten email or business functions. The company turned to 2nd Watch to facilitate the solution.

The 2nd Watch Solution & Business Benefits

To avoid future data center failures, 2nd Watch determined that the company needed a solution that enabled it to run on-premises and in the cloud simultaneously. In order to meet these requirements, 2nd Watch configured a hybrid environment with the single sign-on access, in addition to migrating its 180 public folder database, which contained over 100,000 objects consuming approximately 75GB of data, to SharePoint Online.

2nd Watch also set up a Lync Hybrid solution, enabling the company to move people between on-premises Lync and Lync online at its convenience. This allowed for agility and flexibility for users required to stay on-premises due to 3rd part software requirements.

Thanks to the migration, the educational publisher now receives higher SLA’s, and its email system remains unaffected by local natural disasters, ensuring the company’s continued excellence in customer delivery and satisfaction.