The situation
In July, a 50-person construction-engineering firm asked us to take over its IT from its previous provider. The brief was an orderly handover: documentation, backups and a planned switchover.
That isn’t what happened. The previous provider took twelve days to hand over access. When the credentials finally arrived, the provider handed over no documentation and no backups. The shutdown date stayed fixed at the end of the month, whatever state we were in. That left nine days.
What we did
Rebuilt instead of migrating. With nothing documented, taking over the old setup would have meant inheriting problems nobody could explain. We built a new environment and moved the data, servers and domain into it.
Worked when the firm didn’t. Fifty people had to keep working on live projects during the day, so every critical step ran at night and at weekends.
Tested the way back three times. Before switching anything, we set up new backups and ran three disaster-recovery tests. The firm now had backups it could rely on.
Switched over in one night, rebuilt access in one weekend. The servers moved over in the night the old provider shut down. The following weekend we built a new access architecture: connectivity between the sites, remote access through Microsoft Entra ID and a new VPN client rolled out to every device.
On Monday morning, all 50 people were working.
What it took
173 hours of engineering work in three weeks, with every critical step at night or at weekends. One TechPilot accountable for every decision, and engineers doing the work instead of a first level relaying messages.
What happened next
The firm stayed. Since then, we’ve run and protected its IT day to day. Now under way: the move to Entra ID, the end of the on-premises print server, and printers and plotters deployed straight to the devices that need them.
Facing a provider who won’t let go? Our guide covers what to secure first.