Integrating Internal Culture to Deliver Groundbreaking Experiences to a Global Fanbase

These workflow challenges were creating major cultural divisions across the organization. 

Technical issues hindered streamlined collaboration between offices, and IT duplications were causing redundant and unnecessary steps and considerations. “One of the biggest points of contention was the communication, because we had multiple different [Microsoft] Teams tenants and that really divided the communication between the groups of offices,” Mary Wiegand, Systems Administrator at ArenaNet, elaborates. 

Additionally, for more than two years NCSoft has maintained their infrastructure in a data center in Dallas, Texas. Paying for the infrastructure capacity, such as cooling, power, and physical space, was expensive. It also created a substantial carbon footprint that NCSoft was eager to reduce to the minimum possible.

It was clear that if these challenges could be overcome, NCSoft’s personnel could work much easier and faster, easily find the files and data they need, communicate with each other in a frictionless environment, save a substantial amount of time, and dedicate their energy to more important tasks – such as continuing to deliver an exceptional experience to their legions of fans.

NCSoft’s customer-facing infrastructure is all built in the cloud. The organization wanted to emulate this approach with their corporate infrastructure. For every service that could be moved to the cloud, it would take significantly less time to stand-up, administrate, maintain security, and ensure updates and backups are completed.

The Solution: Executing a Seamless Tenant Merger.

With two years of work and preparation on the line, NCSoft decided to contact partner companies who could help them manage the complexities of this type of technology transition.

However, it became clear that no organization had the experience or depth to facilitate NCSoft’s plan at any price. That’s when NCSoft engaged CloudServus, the only company who was willing to manage the transition. Because the base instance is located in Korea and uses that language, they would need to transform a single-byte language into a multi-byte language.

The partnership launched with an initial investigation of NCSoft’s current technical infrastructure, culture, data ecosystem, and workloads to establish an efficient migration approach and effectively address NCSoft’s intra-organizational identity crisis. 

They had two Microsoft 365 tenants with no real integration between the two. This wasn’t a scenario where we could come in, plug in a tool, and identities can simply be merged together. There was a lot of employee cross-pollination on both sides and unique account access and authentication requirements that demanded a granular, creative solution. - Ryan Jackson, Principal Consultant at CloudServus.

CloudServus’ holistic, eight-step process provided a north star to strategically navigate the project across key milestones. This included a multi-faceted effort to promote transparency and alignment between all parties regarding decision making, which culminated in an international workshop between CloudServus and NCSoft’s teams in South Korea and the United States.  

Our team spearheaded a meeting in conjunction with the U.S. stakeholders and the South Korean IT team. We had the opportunity to converse with them through a highly impressive translator, get the information we needed, and communicate effectively despite the obvious challenges that were presented. I think our organization handled that well and it speaks to the standard of our consulting services. Overall, this was a great team effort from all sides. - Steve McCann, CloudServus Managing Partner.

“The international aspect, including the time zone and language barrier, was highly unique to NCSoft. This added complexity to the migration and it’s critical that our firm is agile in this regard, especially as more companies transform their business models to participate in the global economy,” says Dave Crawford, VP of Professional Services at CloudServus. “The outcome clearly demonstrated the value of facilitating executive leadership and stakeholder involvement to ensure success.”

NCSoft was extremely limited in their ability to pilot and test this entire tenant merger rollout. CloudServus ensured NCSoft could close access to their user base on Friday, and reopen again Monday morning. CloudServus worked with NCSoft all weekend to ensure that their six months worth of working together could all be completed live in a matter of a weekend. For six months of planning and preparation, everything came down to one weekend. 

“We shut the doors Friday afternoon to our user base and opened it again at 8am Monday morning,” says Harold Burns. “Between those two mileposts, CloudServus was with us the entire time.”