Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception
  • Utilizing Design Thinking, VSO performed a comprehensive study of the Basilica’s IT infrastructure and documented a hybrid cloud solution that removed IT as the bottleneck to operations.
  • Over a six-month period, VSO migrated the majority of applications and servers to the cloud and upgraded the on-site desktop and network environment.
  • VSO continues to provide managed services of all elements of the on-site and cloud IT environment.

Problem

With over a million visitors a year, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (BNSIC) is second only to St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York as a Catholic tourist and pilgrimage destination. BNSIC is open 365 days a year and offers pilgrimage services, an extensive bookstore and gift shop, tour scheduling and special events. In addition, as a not for profit, they maintain databases to manage finances and donations and have upgraded to a new interactive website and enhanced social media platform. All of these services increasingly rely on technology and infrastructure to operate properly.

BNSIC was experiencing multiple day-to-day issues stemming from their outdated in-place equipment. They had an aging, on-premises physical infrastructure, and contracted with VSO to assess and upgrade their IT environment so that they could position themselves for agile growth going forward.

Project Overview

VSO performed a thorough assessment of BNSIC’s physical server environment, VMware architecture, all enterprise applications, the Point of Sale systems (from registers to inventory management and online sales), multi-profile staff desktops, as well as the complete network (including Telco providers, physical switching and routing, and WiFi). VSO designed a comprehensive transformation plan with competitive pricing which detailed both up-front and recurring costs. VSO’s cloud solution allowed all enterprise applications to move to cloud, as well as most desktop applications to be moved to Office 365. The components to the solution included Microsoft Azure Compute Cloud, Azure AD Connect, Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Exchange 365, Microsoft SharePoint, AWS Cloud, and Adobe Creative Cloud.

VSO completed the implementation of the solution within a fixed cost. The implementation required a significant upgrade of the network, and both upgrade and scaled up capacity for WiFi. Six enterprise applications residing on physical servers managed on a VMware hypervisor were replatformed and, in two cases, refactored to be hosted in a federated Microsoft Azure cloud environment. Lastly, the Point of Sale system, which was hard-wired for the old physical network, was refactored to be hosted on the Azure platform.

Finally, the BNSIC contracted with VSO to provide ongoing 24/7 vSQOD managed services of all elements of the IT environment. Desktop support has been made dramatically easier as all files are now stored in the cloud, and most applications in use no longer reside on physical desktops. Network management is now also capable of being delivered remotely.

Customer Benefits & Success Metrics

The long-term result for BNSIC has been significant reduction to capital refresh costs, radically improved uptime, greater resiliency and security, and lowered ongoing costs of operation.

While this does not appear to be a typical VSO customer, it was a true zero to cloud migration and has provided a foundation for VSO to offer a lowered cost for ongoing managed service and future work for more network optimization activities.

Hash Tags

#vSQOD Managed Services, #Operate, #network, #security, #migrate, #deployment, #NotForProfit