International marketing technology and services firm, Ansira has 12 locations around the world from London to Hawaii and is owned by global private equity investors, Advent International. A major portion of their growth strategy is expanding into new markets and developing new capabilities through strategic acquisitions to scale their business. With a twelve member IT team of varying focus areas supporting over 800 employees worldwide and ongoing acquisitions, integrating each of new company and its employees into Ansira’s network had become a very time consuming and difficult process. The long lead-time to integration made it difficult for locations and departments across the organization to share information or collaborate in a consistent way, this led to an abundance of shadow IT with employees using unsupported tools and inefficient email exchanges to share information both internally and with clients. Ansira leaders decided to modernize their work environment and move to the Microsoft cloud to allow for better security, recovery planning, corporate governance and faster onboarding of their new employees. They chose Valorem Reply's unique digital strategy and change management solutions to help ensure a smooth and efficient transformation.

CHALLENGE

• Limited resources to keep up with integration needs for continuous acquisitions.
• Unsupported tools in use that did not meet corporate security standards.
• Newly acquired company employees isolated from Ansira network while awaiting integration.
• Version control and communication efficiency losses due to lack of central document storage and co-authoring capabilities.

SOLUTION

• Migration from on-premise servers to Microsoft Exchange Online, OneDrive and Microsoft EMS E3 for secure file sharing and document storage.
• Transition from Slack to Microsoft Teams for teamwork, communication and collaboration to improve efficiency and security.
• In-depth change management strategy for communication, training and success measurement that would drive adoption and efficient roll out of Office 365 workloads.
• Governance planning to understand Office 365 settings needed to optimize network security.
• Implement Microsoft EMS E3 as well as Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) with Azure Active Directory (AD) for added security.

RESULT

• Faster acquisition integration time to allow new employees to on board and become more effective in a shorter amount of time.
• Centralized document storage provides better version control and collaboration for more effective and efficient workflows like the RFP process.
• Successful adoption and roll out of Office 365 workloads with over 80% active usage.