Thames Water migrates AD infrastructure to new operating system, bringing down annual operating expenditure by £70,000

Client Background

Thames Water, UK’s largest water and waste water services provider, has a customer base of 15 million in London and the Thames Valley region. The company supplies around 2.6 billion liters of tap water and treats 4.4 billion liters of waste water per day.

Industry Landscape

Thirty-two privately owned companies provide quality water, sanitation and drainage services to over 50 million household and non-household consumers in the UK, where the water and sewerage industry was privatized in 1989. Since then, the Water Services Regulation Authority (Ofwat) was set up to protect the rights of consumers and to provide services at a fair price. 

The Opportunity

Thames Water was looking for an agile and digital retail business that would give it a competitive edge in the new deregulated market. The UK Water Act of 2014 will open up the market for competition and, for the first time, give businesses and public sector customers in England the freedom to switch suppliers from April 2017. They needed a partner to help transform their IT Infrastructure by replacing AD-2003 with AD-2012.

The Solution

Wipro leveraged its vast infrastructure expertise, proposing migration of users from multiple domains to a single one. The solution/design helped upgrade of the Active Directory, DNS and DHCP services within Thames Estate to Windows 2012-R1. 

The solution comprised the following components: 

• The upgrade included a full hardware refresh of all servers that host AD, DNS and DHCP services. The hardware refresh was required as the old hardware was 32 bit and was not supported for deployment of the 64 bit Windows 2012 server

• The design also proposed changing the configuration that would secure a future proof cloud-based environment for third-party integrations and reduce the total cost of ownership of the environment as a whole 

• The design relocated internally hosted DNS zones on to the new 2012 DNS infrastructure and implemented a new proxy configuration across the entire user estate. The aim was to address legacy issues that constrained integration of cloud services 

• The design proposed new disaster recovery standards for the Active Directory Services as well as implementation of new DHCP technologies which would provide additional availability to this core servic

Business Impact

By migrating Active Directory to version 2012 and enabling Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS), Thames Water was able to integrate and roll out key application Employee Dashboard. This helped achieve productivity gain of £17,628,707 during 2015-16

Decommissioning of single sign-on (SSO) application and removal of prehistoric hardware helped reduce OPEX by £70,000 annually

Deployed Windows 2012 infrastructure, fully supported to Cloud environment

Domain consolidation ended dependencies on other domains for users

Implemented IPAM (Internet Protocol Address Management) and facilitated functionality, enabling global addresses (IPv6 capable)

Implementation of IP Address Management made DHCP and DNS control simpler, leading to less downtime and improving time of management