The Business Outcomes
- BPEQ experienced no downtime in the last year.
- Systems reliability and stability has increased allowing staff to be more productive.
- BPEQ senior management have the ability to receive and send email from anywhere at any time.
- The fixed monthly cost ensures budgeting is easy.
- The working disaster recovery solution is cost effective and tested on an annual basis.
- The system has the flexibility and capacity to grow.
The Challenge
The Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland (BPEQ) and the Board of Architects of Queensland (BOAQ) are both small government departments who shared the same IT Service Brisbane wide.
Surety IT was supporting both departments when a decision was taken for BPEQ to relocate their office, taking their own IT infrastructure and services with them.
The relocation presented a range of challenges:
- It created a need to design a new IT solution that was cost effective and allowed BPEQ to grow.
- BPEQ didn’t want to migrate to the new IT solution until they were in the new office, therefore the implementation had to happen while the move was occurring.
- Downtime had to be kept to a minimum and all new services had to be up and running by move completion date.
- Only BPEQ data was to be migrated from the server; BOAC data needed to be left in place.
- There needed to be provision a new phone system for BPEQ.
- The budget was strict.
- There was a need to design and implement a suitable off-site backup and disaster recovery solution.
The Solution
To address the project challenges, we implemented our solutions path – a proven process of insight and action that sees us: understand, plan, build, maintain, enhance.
We took a very collaborative and consultative approach and by clearly understanding the issues and challenges that BPEQ were facing, we were able to plan and build the right IT Strategy Services for them that delivered the outcomes they needed.
The process also allowed us to explain our approach to key stakeholders in a way that they understood and could visualise.
The solution and support was tailored specifically for BPEQ. It was reliable, responsive and flexible.
Key aspects of the overall solution were:
- We built a reliable, tailor-made solution that provided users good performance and stability to critical systems.
- We also recommended that, in line with the Queensland Government Cloud computing policy, BPEQ move to a hosted Exchange email solution.
- Designed and implemented a suitable backup strategy.
- We leveraged the use of a Cloud-hosted VoIP telephone service as this was more cost effective for the size of department that BPEQ was and provided high flexibility and reliability.
- We recommended that BPEQ install a suitable internet connection that allowed fast performance and reliability for Cloud-based services.
- We also created a new tailor-made IT support program, Sure[Net], as BPEQ’s requirements and services had changed.
- As part of this managed services program, we still help with technology strategy, provide advice on any technology related projects and are BPEQ’s “one number to call” for issues.