OFFICE 365 AND AZURE CLOUD SERVER MIGRATION

Accuteque is an SME providing business advisory and operational consulting services to Melbourne based clients. With a focus on building relationships, Accuteque help their clients achieve improvement across many areas of business operations including strategy, planning and organisational modelling, business process development and health checks, development and adherence to regulatory frameworks and communication enhancement, cultural development.

In early 2019, many of Accuteque’s IT systems were reaching end of life and needed to be refreshed.  The team were looking for a solution that supported a distributed and remote workforce and that would address current on-premise issues with outdated hardware and software.  They are an extremely collaborative organisation and were looking for solutions that would support inclusion, transparency and co-creation.

Through Zynet’s consultation with Accuteque, several additional cultural requirements were uncovered. Accuteque had found their existing solutions impeded collaboration, making many daily tasks more complicated and time-consuming. Their workforce was heavily reliant on untimely and clunky email communication and antiquated document sharing and collaborative options, such as emailing attachments back and forward amongst team members. After internal brainstorming sessions that collected feedback from the team, Senior Management and key stakeholders at Accuteque understood that there had to be a better way and that they wanted to find a solution to address these issues and implement them within a short timeframe to realise benefits as soon as possible. Their key focus was to ensure enhanced collaboration both internally with their team and with their external clients and partners. In order to achieve the required outcomes, they launched the IT Transformation Project and established an internal IT Transformation Sub-Committee to oversee the discovery, development, implementation and adoption of the required change. Whilst the IT Transformation Sub-Committee had some great ideas and initiatives on the best options available to solve these issues, over time it was identified that the team needed direction from an expert, as they would normally suggest to their clients, on the best way forward for the business. They decided they needed some fresh eyes and expert advise and this was when they reached out to Zynet for guidance.

Zynet has managed the IT Infrastructure of Accuteque for several years and had developed a thorough understanding of their technological, and operational requirements. Zynet understood they had a predominantly remote workforce that were open to modern technology solutions to solve unique business problems. Zynet’s solution consultants discussed the overall business needs with stakeholders and confirmed that there were multiple opportunities for improvement to deliver the desired outcome. Four key requirements were identified:

• Establish a system for centralised user and device account administration and control. This was already available in the existing systems however needed to be enhanced to allow this to be more robust and scalable.

• Provide an easy to manage and administer collaboration platform that would allow flexibility with a remote workforce regardless of the user’s physical location and improve on communication methods and responsiveness

• Consideration to the potentially sensitive nature of the corporate information and intellectual property that would reside in this system and ensure that the confidentiality, integrity and availability of all data could always be maintained

• Transition from on-premise to cloud based solutions, enabling scalability and flexibility for the growth of the business and provide a more robust capability for business continuity.

After careful analysis of the requirements, Zynet proposed several options to the Accuteque IT Transformation Sub-Committee. However, ultimately cloud-based servers and Microsoft’s Office 365 platform were key elements of their migration and environment refresh. This Cloud based option meant that at the end of the project, very little hardware would remain on the customer’s premise.

By working closely with Accuteque to understand their requirements and overall business objectives, Zynet had been able to identify and provide several services including technical project management, solution design, hardware removal and end-to-end solution implementation. All the objectives had been achieved and the user experience and collaboration for Accuteque staff had exceeded the initial expectations.

“Zynet’s overall solutioning and their problem-solving based approach gave Accuteque a range of options from which we could select the best fit for our needs” – says Andrew Taylor, Accuteque’s Project Manager

The comprehensive and collaborative approach to the project design phase provided both Accuteque and Zynet the opportunity to learn that mutual respect, honesty and transparency in a partnership are essential to a great outcome and an understanding of how business works within a client’s space when transitioning the entire business operation to a cloud-based environment. It was an extremely important operational requirement that business continuity was not interrupted during the implementation of the solution.

” The Accuteque migration involved no outages, no downtime and no degradation of service” commented Andrew Taylor, a great outcome in any software and hardware refresh”.

By moving business operations to this solution, Accuteque have reduced their annual technology spend by approximately 50% when factoring in licenses, hardware and on-premise servers. Not only did their technology investment improve but also their ability to collaborate across their entire workforce, increasing flexibility and allowing for uninterrupted productivity and resolved a need for clear collaboration. This solution ultimately strengthened the future growth of the business.

“When the Covid-19 crisis occurred, our team were able to work from home with no impact on their day to day activities.  This would not have been possible prior to the move to Office 365.  Our move to Office 365 has enabled the team to work from anywhere, anytime.   Thanks to the team for an amazing result.” says Caroline Patton CEO and Managing Director

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