CRN Impact Awards: Arinco secures Melbourne healthcare provider DPV Health with Microsoft 365

Melbourne’s Arinco has been named a finalist in the 2021 CRN Impact Awards for its work with healthcare provider DPV Health, under the category Trusted Systems.

Arinco deployed the full end-to-end Microsoft security stack, centred around Office 365, to prevent and detect new security threats and to make DPV Health’s workforce more mobile.

The deployment came amid a spike in phishing attempts and vulnerability exploits at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, plus the need to have DPV staff working from home to comply with lockdowns.

DPV Health also completed merging two separate organisations while also insourcing managed IT services from an external provider to a small, dedicated team, handling networking, security, identity, endpoints, hosting, collaboration and productivity.

Arinco was tapped to work through a tight deadline, rolling out Microsoft’s security components across identity, endpoint, application, information and communication scenarios to every facet of DPV Health’s business. The systems were also ensured to comply with the NIST Cybersecurity framework.

“Arinco's expertise in the Microsoft 365 solution and in particular the security stack was fundamental in ensuring the success of our roll out of modern managed devices and ensuring that our employees were protected from the ever-growing cybersecurity risks in today's landscape,” DPV Health chief information officer Noel Toal said.

“Now that the team is set up with the foundation predominately running on the Microsoft 365 system, next steps will be to support the move of all primary servers to Azure over the next six to twelve months.”

Arinco transitioned DPV away from a legacy terminal server and an end-of-life Windows 7 machine environment, and mobile devices used to take five hours to configure.

Some of the improvements with Office 365 and the Microsoft security stack included fewer help desk tickets, a reduced vulnerability footprint, mobile device configurations only taking one hour, an always-on virtual private network (VPN), faster infrastructure deployment times with Azure DevOps pipelines.

Autopilot also helped the internal IT team to shorten imaging times for devices, allowing the deployment of a fleet of 250 laptops and desktops within a few months.

Arinco said DPV Health’s IT team reported lower overall stress levels and workloads after the engagement, which has also resulted in increased end-user satisfaction with a reduction in support tickets and detections of Indicators of Compromise (IoCs).

Apart from allowing a more mobile workforce, the new cloud-first environment also expanded DPV Health’s offerings to include options like telehealth and teleconferencing.

DPV Health manager of ICT strategy and innovation Riyaz Sameem said, “Arinco had a unique approach to learning about our vision and bringing a flexible approach to design which made them easy to work with. They took the stress out of realising our roadmap within the Microsoft ecosystem.

‘Moving from classic and limited terminal services to modern managed devices using MEM allowed us to rapidly deploy a large number of devices to enable a healthcare workforce to not only work from home while providing critical services but also critical in deployments to response teams, vaccine hubs and testing sites on demand.

“Their expertise in establishing E5 security stack in a short amount of time gave us the reassurance of ensuring all endpoints and identity was secure in a rapidly evolving threat landscape. Arinco’s team worked hand in hand with our internal IT guiding them through a rapidly changing technological landscape.”