Mexican University Boosts IT Service

Reliability with Cloud-Based Applications

Overview
Customer: Universidad Anhuac Mayab
Customer Website:
www.anahuacmayab.mx
Customer Size: 791 employees
Country or Region: Mexico
Industry: EducationHigher education
Customer Profile
Universidad Anhuac Mayab is a private
institution of higher education in Mrida,
Yucatn, Mxico, that offers bachelors,
masters, and doctoral degrees to 3,711
students.
Business Situation
Anhuac Mayab experienced frequent
computer outages due to unreliable
electrical power in its region. It sought to
deliver more reliable, modern technology
services at an affordable cost.
Solution
The university switched to Microsoft
Office 365 for staff and student email and
collaboration services, and used
Microsoft Azure to create single sign-on
functionality for Office 365 and other
applications.
Benefits
Improve reliability of key IT services
Give students and staff easy, anydevice access to modern applications
Deliver enhanced services while
reducing IT work
Enhance data security

Our everyday IT services are far more stable with

Office 365, because we dont have to worry about
servers failing when the power goes out.
David Arjona Espinosa, IT Director, Universidad Anhuac Mayab

Universidad Anhuac Mayab struggled to maintain reliable IT

services in the face of unreliable electrical power. It decided to
make a strategic shift to the cloud, beginning with Microsoft
Office 365 for communications services. It used Microsoft Azure
to create a single sign-on capability to simplify application
access and credentials management. The university has
eliminated up to 16 hours of downtime each month and given
students easy access to Microsoft Office from any device, all
while reducing IT work.

We wanted to
modernize IT services for
both students and staff
without increasing our IT
staff and management
costs.
David Arjona Espinosa, IT Director,
Universidad Anhuac Mayab

Situation

Solution

Universidad Anhuac Mayab is a private

institution of higher education in Mrida,
Yucatn, Mxico, and belongs to the
religious congregation of the Legion of
Christ. The university offers 24 bachelors,
masters, and doctoral degrees, and strives
to nurture the intellectual, professional,
social, and spiritual dimensions of each of
its 3,711 students. The university employs
600 faculty and staff members.

Universidad Anhuac Mayab decided to

give its 791 faculty members and 3,711
students subscriptions to Microsoft Office
365, a cloud-based suite of email,
document sharing, instant messaging, and
conferencing solutions that also includes
the Microsoft Office applications. The
university was particularly interested in
licensing Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus,
which lets students download the full Office
applications on up to five devices.

Anhuac Mayab struggled to deliver

reliable IT services in the face of
undependable electrical power in its region.
The universitys servers were constantly
disabled, with downtime and recovery time
stretching to several hours a week. Our
electrical power problems severely affected
the productivity of both staff and students,
says David Arjona Espinosa, IT Director of
Universidad Anhuac Mayab.
When it was time to upgrade the Microsoft
Exchange Server 2003 email system used
by the staff, Anhuac Mayab considered
cloud computing options to gain
independence from the electrical power
problems. If the power went out on
campus, staff and students could continue
to use cloud services through phone
networks or off-campus Wi-Fi networks.
A move to the cloud would also give the
university a chance to offer staff and
students much more than just email. It
could add cloud-based document sharing,
instant messaging, and other services that
staff and students used in other areas of
their lives and wanted at the university.
Further, cloud-based communications tools
would relieve the universitys small IT staff
of onerous email server maintenance
chores, giving them more time to research
and deliver new IT services. We wanted to
modernize IT services for both students and
staff without increasing our IT staff and
management costs, Arjona says.

We felt that cloud services would give us

more robust reliability, always up-to-dateservices, and lower costs, Arjona says. We
looked at Google applications but
preferred Microsoft for its more
personalized support. Plus, Office 365 came
with the full suite of Office apps, which all
our staff and students use.
The university gives first-year students an
Apple iPad tablet, but students always had
to get their own copies of Microsoft Office,
which was expensiveand then they had
the applications available only on that one
computer. Through a program called
Microsoft Student Advantage, students at
colleges and universities have access to
Office 365 ProPlus at no additional charge
if all faculty and staff members are licensed
for Office 365 ProPlus, including Office for
iPad.
Create Cloud-Based Single Sign-On
The university was excited about the wealth
of new services that Office 365 would
provide its staff and students but needed
one more thing to make it perfect: single
sign-on (SSO). It wanted Office 365
credentials and sign-in to be unified with
its existing Active Directory Domain
Services directory service. It did not want to
make faculty and students sign in to Office
365 independently of other university
applications and services.
Because it was new to the cloud, Anhuac
Mayab turned to Opti Solutions, a local
member of the Microsoft Partner Network,

Office 365 ProPlus gives

our students access to
the full Office
applications on any
computer, which helps
because sometimes
students dont have
Internet access.
David Arjona Espinosa, IT Director,
Universidad Anhuac Mayab

to help it migrate to Office 365 and create

SSO functionality using Microsoft Azure.
Azure is a Microsoft cloud service that
provides on-demand compute, storage,
and networking capabilities to host and
manage web applications from Microsoft
datacenters.
Opti Solutions designed a migration plan
for moving the universitys email accounts
to Office 365 and set up SSO in Azure.
Opti Solutions had all the expertise we
lacked and helped us set up Office 365 in
just one month, in time for our 20142015
school year, Arjona says. Using Azure for
our SSO infrastructure eliminated the need
to invest in additional servers.
With SSO, university users are able to use
their existing credentials to access Office
365 services and removes the burden on
the IT staff of managing multiple logon
identities and passwords. Office 365 uses
Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 and
the Azure Active Directory Sync tool to
achieve SSO.
The university uses a single on-premises
Active Directory domain controller as its
authority logon server and used Azure
Virtual Machines to create seven virtual
machines to serve as secondary domain
controllers, Active Directory Federation
Services federation, proxies, and Active
Directory synchronization servers. It uses
Azure Storage to store user credentials and
Azure Active Directory to store Office 365
credentials. When IT staffers create user
accounts in the on-premises Active
Directory, they are automatically created in
Office 365 with the same attributes and
stored in Azure Active Directory.
Use Cloud for High Availability
Creating an SSO capability was the
universitys first step into Azure but not the
last. It plans to migrate other applications
such as web systems and databases to the
Microsoft cloud platform to increase
reliability and reduce capital costs. We
would like to put a replica of key databases

in Azure for backup purposes and to ensure

high availability of our data, Arjona says.
Also, our school is one of 10 sister
universities across Mexico, and university
management may replicate our Office 365
and Azure SSO setup at the other schools.
Give Students Any-Device Access to
Applications
Students arriving on campus this fall are
just beginning to familiarize themselves
with the Office 365 services, but already
Office 365 ProPlus is one of the favorites.
Students can install the latest Office
applications on their university-issued iPads
and their personal PCs, tablets, and
smartphones. Office 365 ProPlus gives our
students access to the full Office
applications on any computer, which helps
because sometimes students dont have
Internet access, Arjona says. They are very
happy to have free access to all of the
Office programs on whatever device they
are using.

Benefits
By switching to Microsoft Office 365 with
Azure-based single sign-on, Universidad
Anhuac Mayab has been able to improve
the breadth and reliability of
communications and collaboration services,
and give staff and students an easy way to
access these services. It was the first
educational institution in Mexico to
successfully integrate Azure Virtual
Machines and Office 365 using SSO.
Even better, the university was able to
greatly expand its campus IT service
offerings without expanding its IT staffs
workload. And the IT director feels that
email, documents, and user credentials are
far safer in the Microsoft cloud than on
campus servers.
Improve Reliability of Key IT Services
Now, when the power goes out on campus,
staff and students continue to use Office
365 services by switching to phone
networks or Wi-Fi networks off campus.

Azure Active Directory

simplified our ability to
maintain user credentials
across on-premises and
cloud-based
applications.
David Arjona Espinosa, IT Director,
Universidad Anhuac Mayab

Its great for our staff to have

uninterrupted access to the applications
they depend on every day, Arjona says.
Our everyday IT services are far more
stable with Office 365, because we dont
have to worry about servers failing when
the power goes out. Users can continue to
sign in to Office 365, even when the onpremises infrastructure is temporarily
unavailable.
Give Students and Staff Easy, Any-Device
Access to Modern Applications
With single sign-on to all university
applications and Office 365, staff and
students can easily access services from off
campus and use their personal devices for
work. This yields higher productivity and
greater flexibility in when and where work
is done.
In Mexico, Office is the standard
productivity suite, and our students will
probably use it in the workplace after they
graduate so its important that they be
familiar with it, Arjona says. Students work
together on many projects, and they can
use the collaboration services in Office 365
such as SharePoint Online for document
sharing and Lync Online for conferencing.
Office 365 is perfect for this kind of
environment and helps us attract students,
who expect these services.

By using SSO and

Azure, our IT staff has to
worry about only one set
of credentials.
David Arjona Espinosa, IT Director,
Universidad Anhuac Mayab

Improve IT Services While Reducing IT

Work
By using Azure, Anhuac Mayab was able
to set up its Office 365 infrastructure
components in a short time, requiring no
additional on-premises hardware. For the IT
staff, Azure Active Directory provides a way
to create users on Active Directory and
have these credentials replicated in Office
365. Azure Active Directory simplified our
ability to maintain user credentials across
on-premises and cloud-based
applications, Arjona says. Otherwise, we
would have to manage our cloud services
separately, which would double our work.
By using SSO and Azure, our IT staff has to
worry about only one set of credentials.

Also, with Office 365, the university IT staff

no longer has to spend time upgrading
Office programs across 600 university PCs,
which will eliminate two to three weeks of
work every three to four years.
Enhance Data Security
As for the security of documents, email,
and user credentials in the cloud, Arjona
feels that the universitys data is more
secure in Azure and Office 365 than in its
on-premises servers. Some people are
worried about putting data in the cloud,
but Microsoft has a vast security team and
infrastructure, which we could never
duplicate, he says. If anything, our data
security has improved vastly by moving to
the cloud.

For More Information

Empower enterprise mobility

For more information about Microsoft

products and services, call the Microsoft
Sales Information Center at (800) 4269400. In Canada, call the Microsoft
Canada Information Centre at (877) 5682495. Customers in the United States and
Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing
can reach Microsoft text telephone
(TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234.
Outside the 50 United States and
Canada, please contact your local
Microsoft subsidiary. To access
information using the World Wide Web,
go to:
www.microsoft.com

The Enterprise Mobility Suite from

Microsoft unifies identity, data and mobile
device management in a people-centric
approach. Company employees can be
more productive by having the freedom to
work from anywhere on virtually any
devicewith full, highly secure access that
IT can monitor and manage easily and
effectively.
For more information about empowering
people-centric IT, go to:
www.microsoft.com/en-us/servercloud/cloud-os/pcit.aspx

For more information about Opti

Solutions products and services, visit the
website at:
www.optisolutionsit.com
For more information about Universidad
Anhuac Mayab, visit the website at:
www.anahuacmayab.mx

Software and Services

Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure Active Directory
Microsoft Azure Storage
Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines
Microsoft Office 365
Microsoft Exchange Online
Microsoft Lync Online
Microsoft Office 365 ProPlus
Microsoft SharePoint Online

Technologies
Active Directory Domain Services
Active Directory Federation Services

Partners

Opti Solutions

This case study is for informational purposes only.

MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published September 2014

Error! No se encuentra el origen de la referencia.