Established in 1996, South Africa’s Particular Investigating Unit (SIU) has acted as a trusted anti-corruption, forensic investigation, and litigation company to recuperate monetary losses and proper wrongdoing. However with a protracted historical past comes legacy tech and inefficiencies. One thing an entity just like the SIU can’t afford.

CIO Tumelo Zwane understands how new and rising applied sciences can play vital roles to streamline the work the SIU does, so she and her crew not too long ago got down to replace the unit’s communication and collaboration applied sciences. The undertaking began originally of 2022, says Zwane, noting that the SIU nonetheless ran GroupWise on the time, a platform that helps e mail, on the spot messaging and doc administration. Whereas there are nonetheless a considerable variety of organizations working GroupWise, many have opted to maneuver away from the platform and migrate to newer applied sciences.

“From a technological viewpoint, GroupWise now not fulfilled our wants and lacked the capabilities we had been searching for,” she says, which is why they determined emigrate all 600 of their customers to Microsoft. The transfer kinds a part of the SIU’s broader digital transformation and cloud migration technique that began round 4 years in the past with the intention to standardize their broader tech stack. However as she factors out, they aren’t solely cloud-based, as an alternative embracing a hybrid technique as a result of knowledge sovereignty legal guidelines and governance constructions dictate what sort of info they’ll and might’t retailer within the cloud.

Navigating the migration

After all, this was not a easy process, particularly contemplating how a lot knowledge the company was coping with. “Most individuals had been utilizing their mailbox as an archiving device, which meant that a few of our customers had mailboxes that had been completely big,” she says.

Whereas the SIU labored with a managed service supplier (MSP) across the configuration facet of the migration, and this accomplice gave them steerage, they ended up doing the precise migration train themselves. “We had an inside timeline and goal we wished to fulfill, and after we regarded on the totally different outlines we received when asking for help from the market, it was going to take for much longer than we wished it to take,” she says. “So we did some analysis across the totally different necessities and the most effective strategies and strategy, ran some checks, and efficiently managed to implement the required conditions and migrated every part ourselves.” This demanded that she break her crew down into totally different capabilities after which upskill these people to concentrate on sure duties so if a person had a selected drawback, somebody from the crew might help and resolve it.

The transfer to do every part internally was vital to safe the SIU’s operational continuity and to ensure the sustainability of the group. “It’s about constructing our personal timber and creating our personal capabilities so now we have extra scope to tackle related initiatives in a extra assured method sooner or later,” she says.