CRN Impact Awards: Sydney’s First Focus frees Ranbury's staff with ICT refresh

Sydney-headquartered MSP First Focus provided a full ICT refresh for property development project management specialists Ranbury, saving the company time and money on admin and travel, and earning the MSP a finalist spot in the Workforce Empowerment category of CRN’s 2021 Impact Awards.

Ranbury staff who had to work from clients’ sites were experiencing significant disruption to their workflow as they had no remote access to sensitive assets. In order to get any information they needed, they would have to go to physically go to the project management office to download the information, and then return to the office to upload any updates.

“Keeping our people connected to the business and each other is important to us. Ranbury had ageing on-premises ICT infrastructure and wanted to move to a cloud setup that would enable our people to work and collaborate more effectively,” said Ranbury project management office general manager Mike Wells.

To achieve this, he turned to the team at First Focus.

The MSP undertook an array of work for the office including designing and deploying a 400 Mbps symmetrical fibre service WAN link to connect key business locations, and the setup and rollout Microsoft Intune and Autopilot for device deployment and management.

Azure Active Directory and a secure client-access VPN was established for remote access to sensitive data, as well as multi-factor authentication and self-service password reset.

Data migration to SharePoint was planned, as well as NAS and AWS S3 Cloud Backup solutions for long-term retention. 

CloudCall365 with Teams integration was implemented to provide a secure communications solution.

Finally, First Focus’ own Smart Cloud was used to update and migrate virtual machines. 

Altogether, this meant a stable, scalable ICT environment, reducing network downtime and ensuring lower operational expense when demand is low.

It also enabled the staff to finally work remotely and make site visits without having to waste time travelling to and from the project office. 

Wells said that the business’s relationship with technology now feels fresh and customer-focused and his staff now trust their IT to support their work rather than fearing process bottlenecks and relying on in-house workarounds to get the job done. 

“We now have a robust cloud-based ICT environment. Our team are not bound to an office and have the freedom to work effectively from anywhere,” he said. 

“This new way of working enables a more productive and flexible workforce, which translates to better levels of service to our clients. Our tech isn’t a bottleneck holding us back. Now it supports our business and our people.”