Microsoft Intune Migration from On-Premise Servers
Inspiring Learners Multi-Academy Trust is a registered Multi-Academy Trust operating primary schools across Greater Manchester. As the Trust grew, the limitations of its legacy on-premise Windows Server infrastructure became increasingly apparent. Each school maintained its own local server for device management, user authentication and policy enforcement — creating significant management overhead, high hardware maintenance costs and growing security risks as servers aged beyond support lifecycles.
The Trust's IT team was spending a disproportionate amount of time managing ageing server hardware across multiple sites. Remote working demands following the pandemic had exposed the rigidity of on-premise Group Policy management. Servers were approaching end-of-life, replacement costs were significant, and the Trust's growing GDPR obligations required a more auditable, centrally managed approach to device security and compliance. The migration needed to happen without disrupting teaching, assessments or admin operations.
Foresight designed a phased migration plan to move the Trust from on-premise Active Directory and Group Policy-managed devices to Microsoft Intune cloud device management via Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD) join. All devices were enrolled into Intune, compliance policies and configuration profiles were built to replicate and improve on the legacy Group Policy settings, and Autopilot was configured for new device deployment. On-premise servers were decommissioned in a controlled sequence, with rollback plans at each stage.
Moving from on-premise servers to Intune has transformed how we manage devices across the Trust. We can now see every device, enforce security policies and deploy software from a single console — and we've eliminated the cost and complexity of maintaining server hardware across our schools.