Brandhouse, the South African joint venture of leading international alcohol beverage companies Diageo, Heineken and Namibia Breweries, has completed a project to restructure and reconfigure its Microsoft Active Directory operation with JSE-listed ICT solutions provider, Square One Solutions Group.
With more than 450 employees and offices in all main centres in South Africa, brandhouse markets and distributes more than 40 of the world's strongest premium alcohol brands. These include premium beers Windhoek, Heineken, Guinness and Kilkenny, a Scotch whisky portfolio including global premium bestseller Johnnie Walker, SA's market leader Bell's, J&B, White Horse and Dimple, a broad selection of single malt whiskies and world-leading brands of vodka, gin, rum, brandy and other spirits.
Brandhouse's external consultants conducted a full audit of the overall IT system in place at the head office in Observatory, Cape Town and reported focus areas for network security improvement. The business solutions division of Square One was then called in to provide a solution. Square One business solutions account manager Oscar Frutuoso said the first step was to execute a full assessment of the IT infrastructure at brandhouse.
"We presented our findings across the entire organisation which highlighted MS Active Directory as an area requiring major improvement. MS Active Directory is a central component of the Windows operating system platform that provides the means to manage the identities and relationships that make up network environments. It needed to be cleaned up, restructured and reconfigured to operate within Microsoft's stringent operational and best practice frameworks."
A remedial plan, which ensured the restructuring would have minimum impact in terms of business interruption, was drawn up and implemented by the Square One team in mid-June. The process was interrupted for 10 days to allow brandhouse to conduct its financial year-end without complications and the restructuring was completed by mid-July.
"Administrative passwords which were embedded in many of the business applications had to be changed so this was halted so as to not have any effect on or delay the year-end processing," said Frutuoso. Square One implemented processes within Active Directory which will allow the organisation to change the administrator password, should the need arise, without affecting business continuity.
Among the MS Active Directory elements that were revised, restructured and optimised were domain name services, sites and services, group policies, naming conventions and systems requirement reviews. Domain controllers were replaced and reconfigured. To further improve security, an object lifecycle model was automated to maintain up to date employee lists and status to prevent the continual pollution of Active Directory. An administrative model defining roles and responsibilities, auditing of access and security and the management of access to administration and accounts, was also implemented.
The end result is a fully functional efficient directory service adhering to best practice design in accordance with Microsoft recommendations, a stabilised environment in which technology benefits are being realised and an infrastructure that is scaleable and maintainable with minimum impact on users.
Brandhouse business support services manager Sipho Masinga said the solution implemented adheres to well-established critical success factors.
"The business support services objectives were to drive efficiency and effective functionality in the overall process through existing tools used by brandhouse to conduct their daily tasks. These objectives were achieved and at the same time the systems were fine-tuned to also give the company better insight into customer behaviour."
Brandhouse network manager Vernon Benting said a vital component of network security is the management of users and groups that have administrative access to the Active Directory service.
"A user who is granted administrative access might inadvertently cause problems by failing to understand the ramifications of configuration changes. Our reconfiguration has minimised the possibility of this."
Share