Our client had 18 federated repositories to support their global operations. The repositories were used to manage all unstructured information relating to the service they supplied to their customers.

Recognising the maintenance overhead and increased costs required to support this environment our client chose Aptus to complete the consolidation project and provide on-going support.

Our client is a global virtual network operator. They enable companies to communicate across wide geographical areas - quickly, reliably, efficiently and securely. Their service includes the design, implementation, security and management of global corporate networks.

Unaware of the potential negative implications, our client's original implementation (before Aptus) provided functionally identical copies of two repositories in each country. Through the federation capabilities local users could connect to another country repository as required.

Over time many inconsistencies had been introduced into the repositories resulting in increased maintenance and upgrade costs.

Given the time zones covered and the wish to minimise any downtime, the available window to complete the switchover to the single consolidated repository was limited.  We worked with our client’s IT, infrastructure and support organisations to complete the project.

An initial study was completed by Aptus to identify the status of the current federated environment. Inconsistencies were identified and we worked with the client to devise a consistent design for the new repository. This encompassed a revised folder structure, permission sets, workflows and new groups setup. Given the complexities of the migration a bespoke tool was created to complete the process.

Our client now enjoys the benefits of a consolidated repository:

• A single global repository providing country based ‘views’ as required.
• Reduced costs through greatly reduced maintenance overheads.
• Increased reliability of service and reduced risk of failure through reduced load on the existing hardware.