Infrastructure Overhaul with Zero Downtime

SGS Economics and Planning

SGS Economics and Planning offers a range of consultancy projects for organisations in the public, private and not-for-profit sectors across Australia and around the world. Their team of around 65 staff includes urban economists, econometricians, town planners, social policy analysts, geographers, researchers, and urban designers.

Where they were

SGS’ business requires its consulting staff to spend extended periods of time working on the road in both remote locations and overseas. The need for high levels of interconnectivity between multiple staff and contractors to large volumes of data was vital, however, their previous IT systems weren’t meeting their needs, and they had experienced increasing dissatisfaction with their previous IT support partner.

What we did

After a thorough RFP process, SGS choose to partner with First Focus to start supporting their systems. Ron Lloyd, National Business Manager for SGS explains why.

‘It’s always a worry when changing IT service providers, but I’m glad to say that our decision to work with First Focus has been vindicated. They are very responsive to our needs, proactive in bringing ideas to us, without being pushy for a big sale and easy to do business with.’

After smoothly transitioning IT support, First Focus identified several infrastructure areas for improvement and presented a business case for each one.

Starting with a new Managed Wide Area Network delivering high-speed inter-office connectivity, First Focus then moved on to complete a server and storage overhaul project, replacing their multiple physical servers with an integrated First Focus Smart Cloud solution.

All of these projects were delivered on time, within budget and without interruptions to SGS’ operations.

The results?

The combination of servers hosted in our Smart Cloud, Private MPLS network links directly between our Smart Cloud and SGS offices, and a comprehensive unlimited support and outsourcing plan have provided SGS with an ideal infrastructure platform.

Our implementation team is practiced in “zero downtime” transitions and this was important to SGS’s operations.

SGS now have far more inter-office bandwidth on our managed network than they had before, and their infrastructure now supports the needs of all the remote workers.

“It’s fair to say that SGS’ systems and support are considerably improved since teaming with First Focus,” says Ron