In amidst the pandemic of COVID-19, Bowen Buchbinder Vilensky approached CT Group for some urgent assistance to help the organisation with a rebuild of their entire network infrastructure, as well as deploying a fully cloud hosted solution that will allow staff the flexibility and mobility required during these challenging times.Post the deployment, the implementation of a new ongoing managed service engagement was required to maintain the new infrastructure. This was to be completed within an extremely short time frame, due to unforeseen circumstances experienced by the organisation.

Bowen Buchbinder Vilensky utilised bespoke practice management software and a dedicated document management system within their firm, as a standard practice with most professional service firms. Apart from the requirements to create an infrastructure to accommodate these platforms, the underlining Windows operating software also had to be upgraded to the latest versions from a security and compliance perspective.The biggest challenge during this deployment, apart from the time-frame in which to roll out the environment, was the level of access to previous or legacy data/information, which was limited as best. Therefore, the entire infrastructure had to be rebuilt from the start with new virtual machines and user profiles etc.

T Group embarked on the cloud deployment with the vision in mind to provide the robustness and mobility required, leveraging best practice solutions designed, developed and implemented by leading engineers.

TIME-FRAME

• We engaged with the organisation on the 12th of March 2020
• The server infrastructure was fully live and accessible by all staff by midday Tuesday the 17th of March

IT DEPLOYMENTS

• Deployed Terminal Services to maintain the user experience (RDP into the cloud environment)
• Setup the Office 365 exchange platform to work with the remote servers
• Deployed new user profiles with group policies
• Printing and scanning active as normal
• Full remote dictation through Speech Exec Enterprise
• Installed a comprehensive remote monitoring and management tool with advanced anti virus features

IT ADDITIONAL SECURITY

• Combined with the above we also deployed two factor authentication to access the RDP connection
• Initiated a daily image level backup to a secondary local host within the datacenter
• Deployed a full server replica to a secondary datacenter location (Both within Australia)
• Improved on the Office 365 security health ratings
• Implemented basic profile password policies

The final outstanding application sets that still had to be deployed by 3rd party providers were a new practice management software suite, which the company decided to change to during this phase and finally, the previously used document management system.

The implementation of this new system in conjunction with the security protocols we deployed provided the efficiency and process management required by the firm in a significantly short timeframe.These were realised by ensuring the following;

• Provide a ubiquitous working environment for all staff regardless of location – even “home office”
• Secure and reliable platform to ensure data and critical applications can be accessed at any time
• Continue to utilise IT as a leverage tool for the business as opposed to a lagging tool
• Provided an environment that allows staff to perform all their daily tasks as normal including dictation
• Increased security with more transparency/visibility across the network

Miranda Stephens  Practice Manager

Under very stressful circumstances, CT Group came through for our firm and provided everything they promised, on budget and well within the short time frame.Our firm was back up and working within days in a cloud environment after losing everything. They assisted us with contacting our providers and sorting out the technical needs to replace all our missing software as well as putting us in contact with alternate providers.At any stage, particularly in those crucial first few weeks, CT Group were available at any time for us and sorted any IT or technical issue we were having. No time was out of bounds and neither was any request. Once things calmed down on our side, CT Group continued to provide their high level of professionalism and services.We could not have asked for a better service and we are extremely happy that we made the change to CT Group.They go above and beyond any IT service provider I have worked with.