BYU-Idaho retires a dozen SharePoint servers

Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.

That was certainly the case recently at BYU-Idaho's Information Technology department. Amber Gneiting, Matt Wolfley and Trevor Squires had already begun preparations to clean up the 200+ SharePoint sites used for file management by a wide variety of campus departments. The sites were spread across 12 on-premise servers, and the service had been running for 12 years.

Then opportunity knocked when they were alerted to some significant security vulnerabilities.

"Initially we had been migrating about one site every other month to a cloud solution," Gneiting said. "When it became a question of 'Can we get rid of this?', we got the whole thing done in two weeks."

Gneiting quickly determined that nearly half the sites were no longer needed. These deletions reduced the amount of storage by nearly 3 terabytes. The other 112 sites were migrated to Office 365, which improves the service availability to campus users.

"It's nice to not worry about those 12 servers," Gneiting said. "I don't have to update those anymore, which reduces our potential downtime and maintenance hours."

Technology retirements such as this are a real cause for celebration. The demands to add new technology never stop, which makes it imperative to strategically subtract old and unneeded tools and services.

"This was a great example of being handed a difficult situation and finding a way to turn it into a win," said Joe McWilliams, BYU-Idaho's chief information officer. "Amber and her team had the vision to know where we were ultimately headed with SharePoint and to see the opportunity. Consolidating SharePoint and removing on-prem servers and storage decreased our overhead, enhanced security, and improved the overall environment for users."