St Hilliers Property, an Australian construction company, is overcoming operational challenges and developing a technology roadmap for the future with Tecala.
As one of Australia’s leading, private, integrated property development and construction groups, St Hilliers has a portfolio of projects working with both private and government institutions.
The company is currently undergoing significant changes in how IT is delivered and supported. Until recently the internal team was largely focused on day-to-day service delivery responsibilities, which kept the business running and growing. Recently, the team has shifted the focus to more innovative and transformational initiatives towards fit-for-purpose IT infrastructure.
Data challenges in a distributed enterprise
With sites across Australia, St Hilliers has IT infrastructure in various environments from offices in central business district locations to remote regional sites.
The distributed nature of the company’s network meant business critical tasks, including backups of remote locations and managing hardware warranty and support contracts, were creating significant operational overhead for the team.
Moreover, time taken to run these essential, but easily outsourced tasks, was distracting from more innovative and transformational projects.
“Advanced technological changes mean there are now opportunities to improve the way we do things. We knew we needed a fresh approach to how we manage IT,” said Viona Lim, Financial Controller, St Hilliers Property.
Aligning IT for future business
In order to leverage IT to support significant growth plans, St Hilliers engaged Tecala to help overcome the operational challenges and develop a technology roadmap for the future.
The decision to partner with Tecala leveraged broad consulting and service delivery expertise and immediately augmented existing capability. This was a strategic inflection point for the company and allowed it to consolidate how IT was being delivered, change the approach and re-envisage the platform for business innovation.
The company is constantly opening new office locations to support construction projects. With some projects lasting three months, others three years, deployment needs to be rapid with security as priority.
As a first step, Tecala provided a high-level technology strategy and roadmap for St Hillier’s future state IT requirements. This incorporated an understanding of the business strategy and any aligned technology developments Tecala would recommend adopting.
This could be updated with high-level recommendations; keep record the individual technology strategies successfully implemented; and record the technology strategies no longer recommended or considered.
This consistent focus ensures performance, reliability and the overall end-user experience continues to expand and improve.
Delivering the technology strategy roadmap
With a technology strategy roadmap established, Tecala could deliver on the requirements and work to improve the company’s security and agility. The program of work included:
• Data protection. Improved backup and monitoring solutions for on-premises and cloud-based data.
• Site connectivity. Standardized connectivity to St Hilliers’ corporate network which results in not only better integration and security management, but also significant overhead savings.
• Internet security. Tecala’s managed firewall service secures Internet and other St Hilliers site traffic. Complex setup of firewalls was streamlined.
• Managed cloud. Migrate infrastructure to Tecala’s VDC (Cloud Computing environment) dramatically reducing infrastructure costs and the high-level of dependency on centralized offices.
• Cloud security. With Tecala as a cloud access security broker (CASB), a new security gateway between the St Hilliers Corporate network and cloud apps was established, improving the detection and management of security risks.
With compute, storage, licensing, security and Backup-As-a-Service managed by Tecala’s MSP model, this shifts and allows more resources at St Hilliers to undertake strategic initiatives especially the evolving requirement on security.
“Security is always paramount for us and we are always searching for ways to improve our security standing, not reduce it,” said Lim.
A new era of agility
With its infrastructure upgraded, data protected and cloud environment secure St Hilliers is entering a new phase where it can quickly provide the IT services staff need without compromising security.
“With Tecala on our side, our teams can focus on delivering customer projects and not IT,” said Lim.
And for a company with a large geographic area to service, having an on-demand, secure workplace that is accessible remotely is a huge win for agility.
“St Hilliers is a great example of how the MSP model works well for companies with existing IT infrastructure and ambitions to grow with the cloud,” said Tecala Group, Managing Director, Pieter DeGunst.
Lim added: “St Hilliers has been operating for over 30 years. We’ve always prided ourselves on the quality and efficacy of our customer service, which is very much based on the promise that we’ll go anywhere for a client, wherever their business takes. Having a technology partner like Tecala allows us to deliver on that promise.
“The way they now deliver and support our IT services gives us a robust, agile and secure technology platform for our business. The strategic technology roadmap they’ve developed gives me and my board complete confidence that our long-term business objectives are being fully supported by our IT infrastructure.”
