Building out Greenfield Network and Infrastructure
Mergers & Acquisitions
Network / Infrastructure
Overview
Our client was acquiring operations of an ongoing Aerospace and Defense contractor and needed to quickly establish and operationalize a full stack network and infrastructure to service and support enterprise manufacturing and all business operations. ViTL was contracted to architect and choreograph the Network and Infrastructure deployment and plan the IT roadmap to be able to mature and grow.
Challenge
-
- The company needed to design, provision, and deploy a new network and infrastructure before losing support services as part of a Transition Service Agreement (TSA) with the divesting parent company.
- The new, stand-alone company had a small IT team to support all key configuration and maintenance of the IT functions.
- The infrastructure and network technology stack would have only 12 months to be architected, provisioned, deployed, and team-trained prior to severing from the parent organization.
- The internal IT team had always relied upon the much larger parent organization for IT support and services and was not equipped to support such a large effort on an aggressive schedule.
- Because of the sensitive nature of some programs and an uncooperative parent organization, there were many unknown requirements associated with the target data size, computing needs, and the number of servers and endpoints required.
Strategy
- ViTL partnered closely with the leadership at the acquired company to ensure we provided the right-sized team with the skills needed to meet the aggressive timeline.
- ViTL’s approach was to leverage our strong partner network and assign technical design experts and deployment resources to focus on the technology stack.
- ViTL Project Managers were aligned into two work streams to provide proper coverage and keep the program on schedule and coordinated across all six work streams.
Execution
- Led detailed network and infrastructure design sessions with the client and the parent company to minimize the number of gaps and blind spots due to the inability to share sensitive information on the current state of their IT environment.
- Designed, built, and deployed a new, parallel network and infrastructure IT environment in the client’s facility.
- Integrated the virtual infrastructure with the hybrid on premises and cloud network in phases to apply best practices allowing for fail-over and recovery.
- Performed a graceful transfer of knowledge to the client’s IT team, setting them up for sustained success.
Outcome
- Completed a state-of-the-art parallel network and infrastructure to support the transition two months ahead of schedule.
- Designed and implemented a supportable and extensible enterprise infrastructure stack.
- Developed a network design to support new architectural needs as business requirements changed.
- Established best practices for cybersecurity to protect the network edges and internals.
- Deployed fault tolerance, fail-over, and recovery best practices.