Odyssey House

Secure Remote Work Solution

“mcrIT have helped us to deliver our mission by building a secure and flexible IT foundation that our staff and clients can rely on. If you’re an NFP looking for an IT Managed Services partner, I’d highly recommend mcrIT.”

Julie Babineau, CEO, Odyssey House

About Odyssey House

Odyssey House is dedicated to the provision of a diverse range of services to adults with alcohol and drug dependencies.

Over the past 40 years, Odyssey House has helped more than 35,000 people turn their lives around.

Odyssey house offers both Community and residential rehabilitation services.

There are 2 24X7 residential rehabilitation centres with medical facilities and staff who depend on the ability to securely access patient data.

The situation

Odyssey House first engaged mcrIT in 2018, when the business needs had outgrown their aging IT equipment and single support engineer. They needed a reliable partner with an understanding of NFP compliance guidelines and security to help support their users who are spread across 6 sites in Australia.

An overarching business goal was to unite 2 disparate Odyssey House organisations. It was the CEO, Julie Babineau’s vision to establish a foundation to standardise their systems across the organisation. Julie knew there would be significant impact to their users when implementing this ‘One Odyssey’ strategy, requiring significant organisational change management.

The mcrIT Solution

After an initial health check of Odyssey House’s infrastructure, the mcrIT team set about modernising their legacy infrastructure – implementing upgrades to their Servers, Network, Desktops, Intranet and Telephony.

Where possible, mcrIT aim to support other NFPs in the ecosystem. This project included the procurement of refurbished laptops and desktops from another NFP, WorkVentures.

A total refresh of the network was implemented, leveraging 4G backup for remote locations with unstable Internet services, which provided additional flexibility for Community Services staff.

Users were migrated to Microsoft 365 to remove the single point of failure of their aging onsite email server and implemented multi factor authentication and Single Sign on to improve their security posture.

The remaining servers were migrated to Azure, removing aged equipment and reducing the reliance on remote locations for key applications.

‘’Sharepoint is a gamechanger for us. Our medical 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.”

Julie Babineau, CEO, Odyssey House

The outcomes

After the system upgrades, there was an immediate improvement in system performance, and savings on hardware maintenance costs. By moving applications into the cloud, updates can now be made in real time, which has significantly improved service to clients.

As a result, Odyssey House have developed a trusting partnership with mcrIT.

When Covid-19 forced the business to change the way they deliver their services, they turned to mcrIT for guidance. They were determined not to disrupt the treatment of their clients.

mcrIT encouraged the team at Odyssey House to leverage the Microsoft collaboration tools like Sharepoint and Teams to support their clients through remote treatment sessions.

These tools have also supported the “One Odyssey” strategy, creating a common set of tools and procedures.

There has been an iterative process of introducing new technologies and security features after implementing a solid foundation with Microsoft 365, thus enabling a smooth transition for the Odyssey House team to leverage the additional applications.