Project Description

ACN Pacific

Managed Services Solution: Servers, Network and Security

‘’mcrIT have added tremendous value to our IT infrastructure team and have proven to have their client’s interests front-and-centre in everything they do. Ultimately, a successful engagement comes down to both parties wanting to make the relationship work as well as quality resources. We have been the beneficiary of both from mcrIT. Having a more stable environment means we spend less time fire-fighting and more time enhancing, evolving, and strategising. ’’

Neil Groll, IT Director, ACN Pacific

Industry: Telecommunications

ACN is the world’s largest direct seller of telecommunications and essential services including Home & Business Phone, Mobile, Mobile Broadband, Broadband Internet, VoIP, Energy, Merchant Services and Home & Business Security.

Customer Challenge

ACN provides critical infrastructure and services to millions of customers worldwide. Ageing IT infrastructure was experiencing significant downtime and failures. Due to rapid growth in ACN’s business, servers and hard drives were reaching capacity on a regular basis, and the number of outages to services were increasing.

This growth, coupled with staff changes created a gap in skills and support capabilities for their network and systems. As a result, updates, enhancements, fault corrections and performance improvements (including critical patches and remediation) were being overlooked.

In addition, ACN needed a strategy for the future of their technology direction.

 mcrIT Solution

ACN’s internal infrastructure is crucial to the success of their customers. Understanding this, mcrIT aimed to deliver value in services and capabilities in the monitoring and managing of ACN’s server platform. This involved remediation, reconfiguring and patching of existing infrastructure to improve server performance and reduce and prevent further outages. Using the latest web-based monitoring tools, mcrIT were able to proactively monitor and provide the much-needed support and peace of mind to ACN, 24×7.

The solution included:

  • Infrastructure management for over 110 Linux and Windows servers (across production and development) as well as security devices providing services to ACN’s clients
  • Implement critical patching and backup regime.
  • Sydney based service desk, with 24×7 15 minute critical response SLA by senior engineers
  • Customised monitoring from infrastructure through to application
  • Level 1 / 2 / 3 Network, Security, Linux, Windows support functions
  • On top of all of this, mcrIT developed a roadmap to transition ACN’s hardware platform to a cloud-based environment

​Client Benefit

ACN Pacific originally signed an 18 month contract, but extended this due to mcrIT’s commitment in delivering the following outcomes:

  • Reduced costs – optimised existing hardware and improved operational efficiencies
  • Upskilled and integrated into ACN team – provided highly skilled Linux, Windows, Networking and Security engineers as part of the ACN IT support team, effectively reducing headcount. mcrIT also provided training for the existing ACN Team.
  • Maintenance of critical business servers – reducing downtime significantly and eliminating outages as a result
  • Proactive security updates and back up processes