Field teams unable to access data during crises

An international NGO operating across Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan had built its IT infrastructure around a single physical server in its Beirut office. All files, the donor database, field reports, and beneficiary records lived on that server. Access outside the office required a VPN that was configured years ago by a volunteer and had not been maintained since.

When the Beirut office became inaccessible for three weeks due to local security conditions, field teams in the Bekaa and in Jordan lost access to everything. Staff were rebuilding spreadsheets from memory. Donor reports were delayed. A funding disbursement was held up because the finance team could not access the contracts.

The server itself was a 6-year-old tower PC running an unlicensed version of Windows Server 2012. Backups ran to an external hard drive in the same room as the server. There was no off-site copy of anything.

The NGO's leadership understood the risk in theory. The three-week blackout made it a board-level priority.

The migration had three phases, designed to minimize disruption during active operations.

Phase 1 was data inventory and preparation. We catalogued every file share on the server — 340GB of data across 6 departments. We cleaned up duplicate and obsolete files in coordination with each department head, reducing the actual migration target to 180GB. We identified the critical datasets: donor database, beneficiary records, finance files, and field reports.

Phase 2 was Microsoft 365 deployment. We provisioned the tenant, configured Exchange Online for email (migrating from a self-hosted mail server), set up SharePoint document libraries matching the existing folder structure, and configured OneDrive for individual staff. MFA was enforced on every account from day one. Conditional access policies restricted sign-ins from high-risk locations. Azure Backup was configured for the SharePoint environment.

Phase 3 was the migration itself. We ran a parallel period of 10 days where staff accessed files in both locations. We then cut over on a Friday evening and monitored the following week closely. Total downtime during cutover: zero.

We also replaced the failing VPN with Microsoft's Always-On VPN for the small number of resources that still required on-premises access, and documented the entire setup in a runbook so the NGO's in-house coordinator could manage routine tasks without external support.

Within 48 hours of cutover, staff in all three countries confirmed access to all files from any device. The field coordinator in Tripoli, who had been emailing documents to herself as a workaround, was able to access the live SharePoint library from her phone.

Fourteen months later, the NGO has experienced no data loss events and no access outages that affected operations. During a subsequent period when the Beirut office was closed for two weeks, field operations continued without disruption.

The NGO's finance team can now generate donor reports directly from SharePoint without requesting files from Beirut. The board approved a follow-on engagement to migrate the legacy donor database to Microsoft Dataverse.