Case Study: International IP Migration

Problem:

A Fortune 500 client has grown their international business dramatically over the last few years, largely through acquisition. To take advantage of the synergies from the acquisitions that have been made over the last few years and to address compliance vulnerabilities, the IT applications and systems need to be standardized and consolidated. Before applications can be consolidated, the foundational IT services need to be standardized across all countries. The first step was to start with the consolidation of Active Directory across all countries which required an assessment and plan for how to address the standardization of IT infrastructure practices.

Approach and Execution:

Legient led a cross-functional team including international IT leaders across 13 countries and US based network resources through identifying the scope per country and executing a large-scale IP migration. We managed the schedules simultaneously across all markets.

To consolidate the active directory domains to match the corporate domain the first thing that needed to be addressed was the network IP space. Many of the countries had IP space that overlapped with the corporate network meaning they could not be connected to the corporate environment. Legient led the IT directors through the following high-level steps developed in conjunction with the clients IT teams:

1. Identify sufficient IP space for all international markets

2. Advertise new IP space on corporate network and local market networks

3. Manually re-assign all network devices to new IP space

4. Create a point-to-point connection between corporate and international IT

5. Define next set of projects to allow migration of Active Director

The most complex part of the execution was the manual work to re-assign devices to a new IP address which required travel across these countries during a global pandemic. Travel restrictions added significant barriers to completion.

Outcome:

The result of our efforts was a completed IP migration across the client’s international markets. This will lay the foundation for the client to standardize technology across the globe. This IP migration is a core requirement for the client’s growth plans. Completing the IP migration as well as developing a plan for continuing the AD migration will allow the client to accomplish their goals.