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Case Study: Atradius Insurance
Atradius is a trade credit insurer. The company achieved revenue of approximately €1.6 billion in
2013.
Atradius provides trade credit insurance, surety and collections services worldwide. With a presence
through more than 160 offices in 50 countries Atradius has access to credit information on 100
million companies across the globe. Its products help protect companies from payment risks
associated with selling products and services on credit
Requirements
SystemsUp were engaged by our partner Specialist Computer Centres (SCC) to assist with the
technical design and solutions architecture roles for a program of works with Atradius Insurance
based in Cardiff.
Atradius had recently purchased a number of new Laptop and Desktop devices. Windows XP was the
current desktop operating system of choice. Due to lack of vendor support for this platform as well
as the ending of support by Microsoft Atradius required Windows XP to be retired.
One key requirement was to maintain business as usual and ensure that the changes did not affect
ongoing operational considerations.
Initial discussions were around Active Directory Domain migration as the existing Domain was
connected to 2 separate additional Novell directory tree’s and a number of external domain trusts.
SystemsUp approach
By following our assuredDelivery™ process we ensured that the customers key business
requirements were captured before any design work began.
Once the requirements were understood a review of the current environment was made. This
helped provide an in depth understanding of where the customer was in relation to where they
wished to be.
Solution
SystemsUp designed an approach where remediation of the existing Domain could be undertaken
with no impact to the existing environment and operational activities. This was done by creating a
separate organisational unit structure with new policies designed for Windows 7. The existing policy
set ran to over 130 policies and around 80 login scripts.
This was able to be reduced to 4 policies and 2 or 3 scripts.
User accounts were spread across many hundreds of containers. The project consolidated these into
a single container and leveraged AD properties and AD sites for policies. This was done through the
use of client side targeting with custom LDAP queries. Department and Office fields were used
where previously organisational units were used.
External trusted Domains were reviewed and a number were found to be obsolete. These were
deleted. The Domain was upgraded and prepared for Server 2012 and Exchange 2010.
Group policy preferences and loopback policies were used to allow users to access both the
Windows XP environment as well as the new Windows 7 environment at the same time seamlessly
while running 2 separate policy sets.
A plan to retire the external Novell directory tree’s was also created. This design was based on the
fact that users already existed in both tree’s due to a replication utility. Applications were to be
remediated to point to the single authoritative tree.
Additionally a Microsoft Windows Remote Desktop test and development environment was
designed and created to support the application remediation and transformation work stream. By
leveraging deduplication a single server to support over 100 user virtual machines with a reduction
in over 80% of disk space requirements over traditional storage.
SystemsUp also provided Citrix consultancy for the design of the application virtualisation estate.
Applications were to be published to provide users with a clean and seamless experience with single
sign on. The solution was based on XenApp 6.5 due to application compatibility. The applications
were published into the user start menu. The Citrix experience was seamless due to single sign on.
This meant that in order to tell the difference published applications were prefixed with CTX.
Once the designs were implemented and tested from test into live SystemsUp handed over to SCC
for the rollout.
At each stage of the project compliance with the captured requirements was verified. This ensured
that the project was kept on scope and that the key deliverables were met.
The customer’s main business requirement to de-risk the estate by removing unsupported operating
systems was met. An additional benefit was the reduction in complexity and increased supportability
of the new platform, simplified domain structure and policy sets.
Customer Reference
Sarah Muldoon
Project Manager Atradius Insurance
Sarah.muldoon@atradius.com