Sydney's MCR IT upgrades Odyssey House's IT infrastructure

Sydney-based managed services provider MCR IT has secured a deal to upgrade the IT infrastructure of non-profit Odyssey House to improve its operations.

Based in Sydney, Odyssey House is a substance abuse rehabilitation facility offering counselling, mental health services and family and parent support programs in locations across the city.

The organisation tapped MCR to help improve operations across its six sites, specifically combining two disparate Odyssey House operations. The MSP was chosen for its knowledge of not-for-profit compliance guidelines and security.

Following a health check, MCR replaced Odyssey House’s legacy infrastructure and upgraded its servers, networks, desktops, intranet and telephony.

“MCR IT has helped us to deliver our mission by building a secure and flexible IT foundation that our staff and clients can rely on,” Odyssey House chief executive Julie Babineau said.

MCR procured a number of refurbished laptops and desktops from WorkVentures, an IT social enterprise selling technology solutions to non-profits. The network was refreshed, adding 4G backup for remote locations with unstable Internet services.

Users were also migrated to Microsoft 365 to remove the single point of failure of Odyssey House’s email server. MCR also brought in multi-factor authentication and single sign-on to improve security. The other servers were then migrated to Azure to reduce the reliance on remote locations for key applications and to phase out aging equipment.

MCR said Odyssey House reported improvements to system performance and user experience for both clients and staff, and that the system itself was more dependable with proactive maintenance and risk avoidance measures in place.

The organisation also reported hardware maintenance cost savings, real-time updates with the cloud applications, and for having a common set of tools and procedures built around Sharepoint and Teams.

“Sharepoint is a game changer for us. Our staff can securely access shared records from one site in the morning, and update that record from a different site in the afternoon – all while collaborating with other team members in remote locations,” Babineau said.

‘’If you’re a non-profit looking for an IT managed services partner, I’d highly recommend MCR IT.”