emergency localization of IT infrastructure
In 2022, many companies with foreign head offices managed to take care of transferring their IT infrastructure to Russia. The remaining companies, which were “lucky” enough to maintain their work with the support of the central office, are just beginning to think about localization.
By postponing the localization of IT infrastructure “for later”, a business risks facing emergency localization, in which part of the data will be very difficult, and perhaps even impossible, to transfer.
My name is Alexey Goryunov. I work as a project office manager at ALP ITSM. I will share my experience in localization when it is urgently needed.
Planned and emergency localization
Ideal scenario
The organization makes a decision on localization in advance and contacts an IT service company, which conducts an audit of the existing IT structure, identifies the IT needs of the business, develops and launches the project.
Planned localization lasts from 4 to 6 months, during which absolutely the entire IT infrastructure of the company will be localized, tested and launched into operation without failures. Business downtime in this scenario is minimal.
NOT an ideal scenario
An organization learns that in a month the head office will no longer service their IT infrastructure and urgently turns to a third party for help.
The contractor company develops a localization project in an accelerated mode, without conducting a full audit and relying only on the data provided by the customer. Due to the tight deadlines for completing the project, the stage of testing new products is also excluded.
In this scenario, some data may be lost. Downtime is also possible. In addition, since there will be no time to launch the pilot project, there may be disruptions in operation even after the project is launched.
A successful case of emergency localization
Less than ideal emergency localization scenarios in IT often occur. But, as a rule, we cope with such tasks with dignity.
Let me give you an example of how you can urgently localize an IT structure while fulfilling all your obligations to the client.
For reasons of confidentiality, I will not disclose the name of the company, since our client data is protected by NDA.
So, company X, which supplies large construction equipment to Russia and has its head office in Switzerland, approached us with a request to carry out localization.
Conditions and tasks
Prevent business from stopping.
Duration: 2 months.
Localized software should be as similar as possible to what the company was using previously.
Make maximum use of available equipment.
Find the most similar alternative to Teams for video conferencing.
Deploy a new Active Directory domain, migrate employee accounts, all company servers and services to it.
Services that needed to be localized
Since the Russian office of the client company is small (it employs about 40 people), four of our employees were allocated to implement the project – 2 system administrators and 2 user support specialists.
Suggested solutions
The client was offered to switch from the Microsoft Office 365 mail service to the Russian cloud service LanCloud, which uses Exchange as a mail server.
The Microsoft Office suite was retained, but not by subscription, which is impossible to obtain due to sanctions, but based on the boxed version provided by our company.
The corporate platform Teams was replaced by the Yandex Telemost platform.
The previously existing antivirus was replaced with Kaspersky antivirus.
Difficult moments
New Active Directory Domain
A common problem we encounter when localizing IT infrastructure is the difficulty of migrating data from an existing domain to a new one. Foreign colleagues, for reasons of information security, usually do not allow setting up “trust relationships” between domains. Because of this, it can be difficult to plan the migration.
In this project, it was necessary to transfer data from the current domain to a new Active Directory domain. We received the expected refusal to help, so we were forced to manually transfer all the information from the old domain to the new one and reconfigure the service.
Setting up network equipment
The Swiss office refused to provide access to network equipment (routers, switches, access points) for the same security reasons. All settings had to be reset to factory defaults and the network equipment had to be reconfigured.
Postal service
On the issue of mail message migration, we had to negotiate with our foreign colleagues again. As a result, they helped us centrally unload mail archives into PST files. And we, in turn, uploaded them to the new mail service and saved time.
Otherwise, we would have to manually download each user's mail. And this is not only time-consuming, but also not optimal, because with manual downloading no one can guarantee that at least 95% of the data will be saved.
Rising prices for equipment
During the development of the project, it was decided to purchase new equipment. This stage was taken into account in the project, the equipment costs were calculated.
By the time of the purchase, due to new sanctions, prices had risen sharply, and the new price was 30% higher than the previously proposed one. We had to renegotiate prices with the client, which is why the project went beyond the already agreed budget.
Insufficient server capacity
During the development of the migration plan, it became clear that the existing server capacity was insufficient for localization. It was decided to purchase and put into operation an additional server.
Result
One of the important goals of this project was to prevent business interruption. To achieve this goal, we scheduled many jobs on weekends and in the evenings when employees left the office. Thanks to this, the customer company worked without downtime throughout the localization process.
And despite all the difficulties that arose during the development and implementation of the project, such as the lack of time to launch the pilot version, an increase in the budget due to changes in prices for purchased equipment and lengthy negotiations with Swiss colleagues, we met the deadlines. The project was completed successfully.
The client received a clearly functioning IT infrastructure, completely independent from the Swiss office, with all user data transferred.
During the process of localizing a business's IT infrastructure, various situations may arise, and we always find suitable solutions for each of them.
For example, replacement of working programs is often required. For example, if a company previously used the AutoCAD design program, which is now impossible to use in Russia. We can offer the closest analogue – the basic automated design system NanoCAD, configured for Windows.
If the client decides to move away from the Microsoft Office package, we offer a Russian cross-platform package for working with documents – “P7-Office” and “My Office”.
Another example: if a company cannot use the SharePoint platform under current conditions, we will offer migration to Bitrix24. And if the company previously used Veeam Software backup software, we will offer it a Russian product – Cyberprotect.
It is often difficult to find an identical replacement product. However, we always find a solution that best meets the customer's original requirements. |
P.S. I am currently working on a project that needs to be completed as soon as possible – by September 12. The initial conditions are as follows:
there is no time to conduct a full audit;
there is no time to launch a pilot project;
The company's Russian office employs 80 people;
assistance from foreign colleagues is very limited.
I will definitely tell you how we will cope with this task in the next post.
