Case Study – On-prem Server Decommission

Our client is a charity that helps and advises refugees on things like immigration, benefits, housing, and employment. They had an old Windows 2012 Server acting as a domain controller and file share host.

Our client required us to assist in this situation as their server was running a version of Windows that was soon to become unsupported by Microsoft – meaning it would no longer receive critical security patches. The physical server itself was also becoming outdated which meant the likelihood of some sort of hardware failure was increasing.

We assessed the server’s status, making note of all functions that would need to be migrated away from the server to allow it to be decommissioned. A telephone call was then booked with the charity’s manager to discuss our recommendations regarding the server and to gather an idea of their budget.

We then built up a proposal with our recommendations. Our best practice standards in this scenario are to migrate local active directory profiles onto Entra ID (previously Azure AD). There are multiple benefits of this including:

• Increased security and compliance
• Single Sign-On (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA)
• Central Management of Applications and Users
• Increased flexibility and scalability

Another aspect of this process was to remove the domain controller functions (such as DHCP) away from the server. The proposal was soon accepted and the required work was performed efficiently and to a high standard for our happy client.