Telstra-owned VMtech takes disability services provider House with No Steps' backup solutions off the premises

Disability service provider House with No Steps (HWNS) sought the services of Sydney-based VMtech to ease the workload of its IT staff, deploying its disaster recovery and backup solutions.

The Telstra-owned company took HWNS’ IT systems away from its legacy on-premise backup solution relying on SAN-to-SAN replication, to VMtech’s disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) and backup-as-a-service (BaaS).

The move freed up HWNS’ small internal IT team with VMtech taking on the business as usual activities, allowing them to focus on long term strategic goals.

“VMtech back their products and services and go that extra mile when they see us having a less than ideal experience,” Andrew from HWNS’ IT team said.

“They always try to meet customer expectations (even our high expectations!) not simply delivering the product.”

HWNS responded to the newly competitive market brought by the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), shifting its strategy to focus on a nationwide approach to maximise its impact.

The new strategy, as well as its mergers with The Tipping Foundation and Victorian Person Centred Services, brought in 1500 new employees since 2017 to further facilitate services and support.

This growth pushed its IT team to streamline processes across the three entities to increase efficiency and using technologies to adapt and scale, while also adopting an operational expenses focus rather than an upfront capital expense.

VMtech said the transition was seamless, with no downtime and minimal impact to the organisation. It provided an on-boarding process with a workshop to take HWNS through the migration process.

It added that the organisation’s recovery point objective went from 2 hours down to 12 seconds, and that IT staff could access backups granularly with restoration services.

Last month, the changes brought by the NDIS pushed Goulburn Valley-based disability services provider ConnectGV to overhaul its IT services, working with Microsoft partner Advance Computing to migrate to Dynamics 365.