A forensic look to modernize tech at South Africa’s SIU

Established in 1996, South Africa’s Special Investigating Unit (SIU) has acted as a trusted anti-corruption, forensic investigation, and litigation agency to recover financial losses and correct wrongdoing. But with a long history comes legacy tech and inefficiencies. Something an entity like the SIU can’t afford.

CIO Tumelo Zwane understands how new and emerging technologies can play important roles to streamline the work the SIU does, so she and her team recently set out to update the unit’s communication and collaboration technologies. The project started at the beginning of 2022, says Zwane, noting that the SIU still ran GroupWise at the time, a platform that supports email, instant messaging and document management. While there are still a substantial number of organizations running GroupWise, many have opted to move away from the platform and migrate to newer technologies.

“From a technological point of view, GroupWise no longer fulfilled our needs and lacked the capabilities we were looking for,” she says, which is why they decided to migrate all 600 of their users to Microsoft. The move forms part of the SIU’s broader digital transformation and cloud migration strategy that started around four years ago with the intention to standardize their broader tech stack. But as she points out, they aren’t entirely cloud-based, instead embracing a hybrid strategy because data sovereignty laws and governance structures dictate what kind of information they can and can’t store in the cloud.

Navigating the migration

Of course, this was not a simple task, especially considering how much data the agency was dealing with. “Most people were using their mailbox as an archiving tool, which meant that some of our users had mailboxes that were absolutely huge,” she says.

While the SIU worked with a managed service provider (MSP) around the configuration aspect of the migration, and this partner gave them guidance, they ended up doing the actual migration exercise themselves. “We had an internal timeline and target we wanted to meet, and when we looked at the different outlines we got when asking for assistance from the market, it was going to take much longer than we wanted it to take,” she says. “So we did some research around the different requirements and the best methods and approach, ran some tests, and successfully managed to implement the necessary prerequisites and migrated everything ourselves.” This demanded that she break her team down into different functions and then upskill these individuals to focus on certain tasks so if a user had a particular problem, someone from the team could assist and resolve it.

The move to do everything internally was important to secure the SIU’s operational continuity and to guarantee the sustainability of the organization. “It’s about building our own timber and developing our own capabilities so we have more scope to take on similar projects in a more confident manner in the future,” she says.

The power of planning

As a starting point, they advised business to archive and back up specific data so nothing was lost during the switch. Additionally, they had to think about how to migrate without leaving users with periods of time where they couldn’t access their emails. As such, they had to do most of their work at night.

But that wasn’t their only timing issue. The unit also had to content with persistent loadshedding — a method employed by South Africa’s electricity utility to reduce energy demand by temporarily switching off distribution to specific areas. This made the data transfer process decidedly more complex. “If you’re in the middle of migrating massive amounts of data and the power goes out, you have to start all over again,” she says. To mitigate this, they kept a close eye on loadshedding schedules to make sure their data transfer attempts weren’t interrupted. “It required a lot of careful planning and synchronizing resources to get the timing right,” she adds, admitting this was a major but manageable hurdle.

In hindsight, Zwane wouldn’t have done much differently other than keep users in the loop more vigorously during every stage of the journey. “We sent out a lot of information throughout the process, but if I did things again, I would’ve bombarded them with information because they didn’t always move at the pace we would have liked,” she says, adding that the SIU ran extensive training around two to three months before the migration, but when time came to make the move, some claimed to not have been adequately trained. “So we had no choice but to run another round of training,” she says. “Keeping your users on the same page as you is quite important. Communication and change management makes a massive difference.”

According to Zwane, one of the biggest benefits to come out of the migration is it created a more well-rounded and digitally capable SIU where they now run on a more agile platform that’s widely used throughout both the public and private sector, meaning their communication tools and protocols no longer fall behind what everyone else is doing. “The Microsoft platform has changed how the organization operates, and it’s created and enhanced our productivity and efficiency,” she says. “This shortens the turnaround times when it comes to our investigations, and ensures we can respond to our mandate more efficiently.”