2018 CRN Fast50 No.8 Secure Bits

Secure Bits started life 13 years ago in Melbourne, but the company looks very different today.
The systems integrator was founded in 2005 as a contractor to the state government in Victoria.

But Secure Bits discovered its niche fairly early on, pivoting its focus towards critical infrastructure when the owners saw a gap in the market for powering data centres.

“When we started the critical infrastructure division, it stemmed from a couple of projects we were running on the IT front when we realised not many people seemed to get the back-end infrastructure of how power, cooling and monitoring and those sorts of things work in the IT stack,” owner Nick Owen told CRN.

That niche has been further narrowed with a focus on government customers, a natural fit for a client base with secure data centre requirement.

Secure Bits hired staff with military backgrounds, including Owen himself. The company has leveraged their experience when it comes to working in secure environments such as government-run data centres.

Those backgrounds came in handy this year when Secure Bits scored one of its biggest contracts to date, a deal with the Department of Defence as part of its uplift program for its regional data centres.

With the influx of government contracts, Secure Bits decided to relocate its head office to Canberra earlier this year. doing so also moved it closer to one of its key partners, Canberra Data Centres.

“Not a lot of our physical work was in Canberra historically, but the relationships were, so it just brought us closer to the customers. That’s helped already in terms of building those relationships further when we’re doing the design and project management phase, but most of our fly-in fly-out staff are still based in Melbourne,” Owen said.

Secure Bits has found success in partnering with much larger IT companies, such as Canberra Data Centres, in order to get its foot in the door when it comes to winning government contracts.

One of Secure Bits’ other major customers is the Department of Home Affairs, won through a contractor partnership with Optus to upgrade 15 sites across Australia and in the Pacific islands.

Looking ahead, Owen said Secure Bits would continue business as usual while racking up more government infrastructure wins, and hinted at a possible push into Sydney with a new office in the future.