ABOUT THE CUSTOMER

World Vision International has a long history of taking action that transforms the world. Its focus is on helping the most vulnerable children, in the most difficult places, overcome poverty and experience fullness of life. Its integrated approach includes water, healthcare, education, child protection, and income generation, with the aim of allowing every child to fulfil their potential.

Across almost 100 countries, World Vision's community of supporters, volunteers and community leaders work together to transform children's lives, raising money and awareness in the world's most prosperous nations while delivering aid in some of the world's most fragile environments.

“Many of the other solution providers we engaged wouldn't consider certain requirements like calendaring and encrypted e-mail, but BCC was able to meet those requirements. Overall, they created a plan to move from proof-of-concept, to piloting, to production that we could follow and repeat in migrations to different tenants. What I look for in a partner versus a vendor: to understand our situation, you were always willing to listen, and you never presumed that you knew more about our environment than we did.”

Joe Hermida · Director of Collaboration, World Vision International 

 

CHALLENGE & BACKGROUND

World Vision needed to migrate approximately 32,000 mailboxes and calendars, with the RFP estimating around 80TB of mail data to be moved. The migration had to be completed by September 2020, and the RFP only went out for tender in December 2019, leaving a brief window of opportunity.

The organisation is globally dispersed, with data residing in 90 different countries. Its work meant engaging with the world's most prosperous nations to raise funds and awareness, while operating in nations with the poorest infrastructure and the greatest humanitarian need. Connectivity into each office ranged from excellent to non-existent, meaning some locations would require an offline data transfer. On top of this, the migration took place at the height of the pandemic, and three World Vision offices were shutting down and relocating regardless, with their data needing to be migrated before the shutdown.

Most staff were working from home or had very limited access to offices, and in some countries staff were not permitted to enter the office at all. In one country, political upheaval meant internet access was switched off for the entire nation; another experienced a military coup, and others faced intermittent power outages. Because of these complexities, the project kicked off only four months prior to the required cut-over date.

THE SOLUTION

BCC MigrationEngine for Mail: secure, resilient, and built for scale

MigrationEngine for Mail is secure: no additional infrastructure or technical account is required, and there is no access to sensitive data by technical personnel during the migration. Whatever challenges were encountered, political or pandemic-related, MigrationEngine for Mail kept performing.

Given World Vision's globally dispersed nature, migrating was never as straightforward as moving offices, departments, or even countries. The decision was made to move a selection of mail for all users in the shortest window possible. BCC's analysis showed there was over 88TB of data across the 32,000 mailboxes and calendars. Migrating that volume in “a big bang” would be a challenge at the best of times, and with the mitigating factors in play, it would have been an almost impossible task. A phased approach was proposed instead. The project team consisted of more than 25 people from World Vision and BCC, covering infrastructure, testing, communications, and project management.

In consultation with World Vision, the decision was made to migrate in three distinct phases: Phase 1 covered the most recent four months of e-mail; Phase 2 covered four years of mail into the Office 365 mailbox; Phase 3 covered mail older than four years into the online archive.

With the added complexity of the offline data transfer, it was essential that the team could migrate the Phase 1 mail for 27,000 accounts within the four-month time frame, while making sure the data for the remaining phases was gathered, validated, and, for offline locations, uploaded to a staging server.

As a heavy user of AWS, World Vision deployed 11 virtual machines for the migration, with one instance used exclusively as a staging server for the offline data transfer and the rest running the MigrationEngine for Mail software. Tracking the offline data took additional effort for the World Vision team given its business-sensitive nature: some shipments were delayed in customs, some were damaged in transit, and in one country political upheaval switched off internet access nationwide mid-migration. These delays meant the project team had to stay agile, migrating the data that was available on a just-in-time basis.

RESULTS & VALUE

One global mail system for the first time in over a decade

World Vision, as an organisation, is now globally on the same mail system for the first time in over a dozen years, a change that has made a huge difference in how it operates. Integration with the older e-mail and calendaring system had always been an issue, holding up global projects and collaboration. With Identity Management and other subject-matter experts now able to concentrate on a single product set, the organisation has been able to start projects that were previously blocked because an offline or on-premises setup was a showstopper.

Being on a cloud-based system has allowed World Vision to move at a faster pace, particularly given the pandemic environment, letting it be more responsive in offering funding opportunities and deploying new initiatives.

“Moving on from the legacy system of HCL Notes that served us well for over 15 years to the new world of cloud-based collaborative systems will help us focus our funding directly on our mission. BCC helped us secure our legacy mail data and make it fully available in the new world.”

Joe Hermida · Director of Collaboration, World Vision International 

CUSTOMER PROFILE

World Vision has a long history of taking action that transforms the world. Its focus is on helping the most vulnerable children, in the most difficult places, overcome poverty and experience fullness of life. Its integrated approach includes water, healthcare, education, child protection, and income generation, with the aim of allowing every child to fulfil their potential.

Across almost 100 countries, World Vision's community of supporters, volunteers and community leaders work together to transform children's lives.