LLWR: Moving from On-Premises Systems to Microsoft Cloud

Overview

A connected cloud environment for a nuclear-sector organisation

The Low Level Waste Repository (LLWR), near Drigg in Cumbria, provides a national facility for the disposal of low level radioactive waste. This project focused on modernising the technology supporting its workforce and business operations.

LLWR's technology environment had developed around services hosted on its own infrastructure. SharePoint supported collaboration and document management, Exchange provided email, file servers held business information, and legacy applications supported organisational processes. Together, these systems formed an important part of how employees accessed information and carried out their work.

Maintaining that environment meant looking after the underlying servers as well as the services running on them. Updates, patching, support and security all required ongoing attention. Modernisation therefore needed to consider the estate as a whole, rather than move individual systems without understanding their relationship to the wider organisation.

Konsolute delivered an on-premises to cloud migration programme that moved email, collaboration and document storage into Microsoft 365, while legacy business applications moved to Microsoft Azure. The project combined workload assessment, information restructuring, phased migration and staff support. It enabled the infrastructure associated with the migrated services to be retired and established a cloud environment on which LLWR could continue to develop its digital workplace.

The challenge

Modernising legacy systems while maintaining operational continuity

LLWR needed to reduce the demands of maintaining on-premises infrastructure while protecting access to the systems and information its people relied on.

For an organisation operating in the nuclear sector, modernising IT involves more than choosing a new platform. Information must remain accessible to the people who need it, permissions must reflect organisational responsibilities, and changes must be planned around operational requirements. LLWR needed to reduce its dependence on ageing infrastructure while maintaining confidence in how its information and services were managed.

The existing workloads presented different migration challenges. SharePoint content had structure, metadata and permissions to consider. Email was part of employees' daily work and needed a controlled transition. File shares contained accumulated information that required review before it could be placed appropriately in the cloud. Business applications brought their own dependencies and operating requirements, so they could not all be treated in the same way.

The requirement was to bring these services into a modern cloud environment without treating migration as a simple transfer of files and systems. The destination needed to make sense for the information being moved and for the people who would use it. Preserving relevant metadata, mapping access and restructuring content where needed were therefore part of the work, alongside the technical movement of workloads.

Operational continuity was another priority. A single change affecting email, documents, collaboration and business applications would have concentrated the impact on employees and support teams. A phased approach allowed the transition to be organised around individual workloads and their dependencies, with the aim of keeping disruption to a minimum. Security, information governance and compliance requirements needed to inform those decisions throughout delivery.

Our approach

A phased migration, shaped around each workload

Konsolute assessed the existing estate, mapped dependencies and planned the transition in stages. Each workload had its own migration approach, with security, access and operational requirements considered throughout.

Assessment. Konsolute began with an assessment of LLWR's existing estate, cataloguing SharePoint sites, Exchange mailboxes, file shares and business applications. We mapped dependencies and worked with stakeholders to agree the migration plan. This established the scope of the transition and helped determine where each workload would sit in Microsoft 365 or Azure. It also provided a basis for considering how employees would access services once they had moved.

Phased delivery. The programme was organised into carefully managed phases rather than treated as one uniform migration. Different workloads needed different preparation and transition arrangements. Planning them together helped connect the technical work with LLWR's operational needs, while the individual migration approaches reflected the characteristics of the systems and information involved.

SharePoint. On-premises SharePoint content moved to SharePoint Online, with sites restructured where needed and relevant metadata and permissions carried across. The aim was to retain the context that made the content useful, rather than transfer documents without regard to how they were organised or accessed. Information structure and permissions were considered alongside the migration itself so that the resulting environment supported its intended users.

Email. Email moved from on-premises Exchange to Exchange Online in scheduled batches. Because mailboxes were central to everyday communication, the transition needed to be planned around staff access and continuity of work. Moving them in batches supported a controlled change rather than requiring the organisation to switch every mailbox at once. The approach was designed to minimise disruption while moving the service away from locally hosted infrastructure.

File shares. File share migration provided an opportunity to review the information being held before deciding what should move. Redundant and outdated content was identified so that it was not carried into the new environment by default. The remaining documents moved into SharePoint Online and OneDrive, with access mapped to the destination. This made content review and organisation part of the transition, rather than leaving the cloud environment to inherit the file shares unchanged.

Business applications. Legacy business applications were assessed individually before being moved to Azure. Each application had to be considered in the context of its dependencies and operating requirements, and the migration approach was selected accordingly. This workload-by-workload assessment was important because an application move involves more than relocating its data: the service still needs an appropriate environment in which to operate.

Security, retirement and support. Security and information governance were considered across these activities, reflecting the requirements of LLWR's operating context. Once the migrated workloads were running in the cloud, the associated on-premises servers could be retired. Training and support helped staff adapt to Microsoft 365 and the changes to their everyday work, connecting the infrastructure transition with the people who would use the resulting services.

Result

A modern foundation for collaboration and business applications

The programme brought the in-scope email, collaboration, document storage and application workloads onto Microsoft 365 and Azure. SharePoint Online, OneDrive and Exchange Online replaced the corresponding legacy services, while the migrated business applications operated in Azure. This enabled LLWR to retire the on-premises servers associated with those workloads rather than continue maintaining both the old and new environments for the same services.

For staff, the resulting cloud environment supported access from the site, the office or remotely within the organisation's access arrangements. The migration connected changes to the underlying infrastructure with the information and services employees used in their daily work. Relevant content structure and permissions remained part of that transition, while training and support helped users adapt to the destination platforms.

Retiring the associated servers reduced the requirement to host, maintain and patch that infrastructure. It did not remove the need to manage identities, permissions, information or applications, but it changed the infrastructure responsibilities attached to the migrated services. LLWR gained a foundation on which it could continue improving collaboration and business applications without depending on the same locally hosted estate.

The project demonstrates the value of treating cloud migration as a coordinated programme of technical and organisational change. Assessment, information review, workload-specific planning and user support all contributed to moving beyond the legacy environment and establishing the platforms for further modernisation.