Retired unsupported Linux servers and moved the township to SharePoint

A local township was running its day-to-day work on legacy Linux servers that were no longer supported. This is a very common situation for municipalities. The servers held years of township records and shared files, but they no longer received security updates, the hardware was aging, and few people understood how they had been set up. Each month without updates made a failure or a security incident more likely, and the township depends on that data to serve its residents.

navitend began by identifying what the old servers were actually doing: the applications running on them, the data they held, and the users and departments who relied on each dataset.

With that map in hand, we migrated the data to SharePoint in Microsoft 365. Each department’s files went to the appropriate SharePoint site, with access matched to the people who need it, so information that used to sit in a shared folder that anyone could open is now organized and secured by department.

We put in place a modern backup solution with additional data security features and substantial data retention, so the township can recover files from well into the past if they are deleted, damaged or affected by ransomware.

We trained township staff on the new way of working: finding and sharing files in SharePoint, working on documents together, and reaching their files securely when they’re away from the office.

Finally, we retired the old servers and securely recycled the hardware, wiping the data so none of the township’s information left with the equipment.

The township now has reliable computing on a supported, secure platform, with its records organized, protected and backed up. With the unsupported servers gone, they are in a much better position to responsibly serve their community.