Standardizing Cloud Infrastructure Across Five Power-Generation Facilities
Prior experience. Our founder, Derrick Schmenk, led this work in an in-house leadership role before it was a DIRC client engagement.
Overview
A multi-facility energy operator needed a more secure, standardized way to run IT across five power-generation facilities. Each location had its own operational demands and local systems. Leadership wanted one cloud and identity foundation that would stand up to security scrutiny, support remote administration, and stop a server room growing at every plant.
The challenge
Infrastructure had grown around local needs across five facilities, creating complexity for support, identity management, and long-term planning. The client needed to modernize without disrupting plant operations, and to raise security without burying plant and office staff in sign-in prompts.
The approach
- Azure environment design, with business systems moved off plant servers and into the cloud
- Identity moved from Active Directory to Microsoft Entra ID only, leaving no domain controllers to maintain
- Zero-trust network access: every connection authenticated by user and device, instead of trusting whoever is on the site network
- Risk-based Conditional Access that challenges a sign-in when the signals call for it, not every time someone opens an app, so nobody is trained to approve prompts without reading them
- Devices enrolled and managed from the cloud with Intune and Autopilot
- On-site equipment limited to the plants' OT systems and the network gear, behind a defined boundary
- Microsoft Teams Rooms in the meeting spaces
- Standardized patterns repeatable at every facility
The outcome
- A secure, Entra ID-only environment across five facilities
- Zero-trust, authenticated access for every user and device, with no MFA fatigue
- On-premises equipment reduced to plant OT systems and network gear
- Microsoft Teams Rooms that worked flawlessly from the start
- Better supportability for remote and multi-site administration
- A foundation ready for future OT, reporting, and modernization work
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