The Florida Department of Management Services (FL DMS) is the business arm of Florida government. The Department’s primary mission is to support sister agencies as well as current and former state employees with workforce and business-related functions so that agencies can focus on their core missions as defined in law.
PROBLEM
FL DMS is made up of three divisions which were brought together legislatively. This merger creates great demands for efficiencies to ensure security, access control, user management, system support, as well as higher levels of responsiveness to growing needs for scalability, data availability, and storage.
As technology solutions become increasingly critical to FL DMS operations, a strong infrastructure foundation is necessary to ensure IT staff can meet the needs of the business. Core to this foundation is an enterprise directory service that will support both ongoing operations and business growth, as planned by this project.
SOLUTION
The new Active Directory design is a single, consolidated domain in a single forest. In addition, a separate Active Directory forest was created specifically for lab and testing purposes. The previous production Active Directories were folded up into the new FL DMS forest/domain. Each division needing separate administrative functions became organizational units (OUs) under the root to allow for better group policy management, consistent implementation of global settings and divisional autonomy.
RESULTS
The consolidation effort and decommissioning of old hardware was completed. The new streamlined single source of authority allows DMS to quickly integrate new cloud applications. Provisioning of new employees is simplified and faster. New teleworker options to allow people to work from home in a secure and productive manner have been enabled.