MSP group Cloud Collective migrates NRMA Motoring and Services to Microsoft 365

NRMA Motoring and Services has tapped Sydney-based Cloud Collective to deploy Microsoft 365 to help it shift to remote work during the COVID-19 restrictions.

Cloud Collective is a group of strategically allied Microsoft Gold partners, Antares Solutions, Icomm and Quorum, offering complementary skills and capabilities to midmarket customers.

NRMA sought to upgrade its systems to Microsoft 365 to improve its security, compliance and data governance posture and also help the company shift to allow for improved work-from-home arrangements.

NRMA senior manager of infrastructure Chris Swadling said, “Our board and senior leaders are continually looking for us to improve our security posture to protect our members, customers and brand.

“We’ve got a well known and trusted brand. We don’t ever want to compromise the loyalty and trust that comes along with that.”

Apart from its insurance business, NRMA also owns car rental company Thrifty, My Fast Ferry and Fantasea Australian Tourist Park Management, so the company wanted to ensure all its systems were secure functioning, and performing at the highest level.

Swadling said NRMA was looking to continuously improve security controls so it tried out a number of Microsoft solutions, including Azure Sentinel, Privileged Identity Management and Privileged Access Management; Advanced Threat Protection, End-Point Detection and Response, Cloud App Security, Azure Information Protection, Conditional Access and Multi Factor Authentication.

“Prior to COVID, we only had a small percentage of staff that accessed our systems remotely. Post-COVID, nearly everyone now works remotely. That means a large increase in exposure and there are more vectors for attack,” Swadling said.

“We’ve worked with Cloud Collective and used things like Conditional Access and MFA in front of our VPN technology to help further secure the increasingly distributed team. We’ve implemented Azure Proxy in front of the platform that’s used by our contact centres. That gives us Conditional Access, MFA and visibility of what’s going on there too.”

Swadling added that he believes the remote working arrangement will persist. “Our new mantra is ‘work is a thing you do, not a place you go’. We’ve been looking at flexible work arrangements and have initiatives in the pipeline to hopefully unlock new labour markets, regional areas for instance, providing opportunities for people would come work with us.”

“We’ve had to bring initiatives forward and the Cloud Collective Team were happy to facilitate, extremely helpful and flexible in the delivery of the project.”