The Challenge

As a leading business player in the FMCG industry, Siniora Food continues to maintain their exceptional operations level in order to ensure smooth executions while delivering high quality consumables to their customers. With this in mind, the company believes that in order to achieve service excellence, they are required to predict unforeseen events and accelerate their IT efforts in terms of infrastructure enhancement and eliminating server downtime incidents while guaranteeing safety of their data. 

Shortly, Siniora Food assessed that keeping their operations stored on-premises is costly in terms of maintenance and usage. Furthermore, they wanted to advance their security to guard their systems from malwares, viruses and unpredicted breaches.

Therefore, Siniora has put a strategy to include acquiring a modern workplace that enables them to ensure high availability of exchange services with almost zero down time, optimum scalability to control their usage and scaling up and down resources as needed. Moreover, acquiring the latest security features to avoid disruptive encounters and enhance the security of the setup and efficiently utilize administration time and effort.

The STS Approach

After a thorough assessment, STS offered Siniora Foods several Office 365 products (Exchange Online, One Drive, Microsoft Teams including Skype for Business, SharePoint, and Office Pro-plus offline + online) answering to their strategy,according to their requirements of:

Enhancing the end user experience and taking advantage of the features proposed in the Exchange online environment.

Ensuring high availability of the Exchange service for Siniora (99.9% up time)

Maintaining the Exchange service at Siniora up to date and as per Microsoft recommendations.

Increasing security levels, using the Advanced Threat Protection that detects and responds to

sophisticated attacks throughout:

 Data protection and leak prevention

Identity Protection and management

 Devices protection

 Siniora Foods relied on STS to manage their back-end IT challenges, so that they can focus on performing their business as normal while STS team were managing the office 365 services in the backend

STS adopted their Managed Services Solutions capabilities to provide a well-rounded outcome with on-going maintenance as follows:

 Identity and Mail management: Managing user identity including Passwords, managing groups, security Permissions and managing users’ mailboxes.

 Managing Microsoft Services: Managing Microsoft cloud services including Office 365 admin portal, Exchange online, security and compliance, Microsoft Teams, OneDrive for Business, ATP.

 Security and Compliance: Managing threat management, basic mail filtering and anti-malware, data loss prevention, search and investigation, eDiscovery hold, Search, retention polices, secure score review and mitigation (subject to license level).

 Azure DNS: Manage DNS zone for Siniora’s domain on Azure giving them hosting grounds for their DNS on Azure when needed.

 Assessment: Security assessment for office 365, manage secure score findings, compliance and GDPR.

 Continuous Learning and Training: End user onboarding and awareness sessions (2 sessions per year on Office 365.

Delivery and conclusion

Migration of 380 users was effectively implemented within a 3 weeks’ time period with zero downtime as Siniora continued business as usual during STS’s execution.

Siniora’s Exchange service is now up to date on continuously, and service up time is as per Microsoft’s SLAs. Moreover, all security policies are applied as per Microsoft best practices.

Siniora’s Migration to Office 365 project now effectively minimizes the administration time and effort and has improved in terms of user experience noticeably.

Testimonials

“We are aware of the importance of maintaining our operations uninterrupted and able to work at maximum capacity, therefore we opted to undergo the migration to cloud journey with Office 365, leveraging the best technologies out there for best business outcome.”

“Having the latest technology is one thing, but combining it with expertise and professionalism is something else. We are happy to have partnered with STS in the project implementation, we have found tremendous support, dedication, and consultation when needed.”

Rafat Abu Khaizaran, Head of IT at Siniora

STS’s take on the project:

“Siniora Food are always keen to provide the best of the best not to their customers only, but to their whole operational spectrum. Having witnessed this hands-on during our project implementation, we at STS ensured to provide them with our solutions following best practices and approaches.”

 “At STS we take digital transformation seriously, and we always strive to inject the latest solutions to our diverse roster of services, providing unlimited transformation opportunities options to our clients in various industries.”

Samih Hamdan, Sr. Sales Executive, STS