Welcome to the newest edition of the Unified IT newsletter for 2020!
It has been an extremely tough 6 months for Australians with the horrid bushfires, drought, floods and now COVID-19 taking hold. Many of us couldn’t really enjoy the festive season and were hoping for a better year in 2020. It is unfortunate that our first edition of 2020 is under these circumstances, however all our employees are staying positive and are here for our all Australian and New Zealand businesses during this time of crisis.
I urge all of you to stay positive, remain safe and know that we will get through this, no matter how long it takes.
We have enabled our business continuity plan and our 470 employees are now predominantly working from home and supported by 3 ICT personnel. We have communicated to all our customers and active project stakeholders that we are open for business.
We are also guiding customers and other organisations on how to enable their employees to work from home during this crisis and any future crisis as well. We have created a Business Continuity Hub for you and are continuously adding to it.
New Zealand: https://www.fusion5.co.nz/business-continuity-resources/
Australia: https://www.fusion5.com.au/business-continuity-resources/
Business Continuity with COVID-19 is a major concern and is affecting all organisations, especially their employees. There are currently up to five different generations of employees in the workforce all with different methods of communicating and working, as such, some companies are finding mixed results with the adoption of a work-from-home (WFH) daily routine for their employees and it is proving to be a challenge.
In addition, any organisation that has had zero or very little work from home capability has been hit the hardest as managers in those businesses are effectively dealing with is an Emergency Change, which is a well-known IT business process. Unfortunately, publishing communications and procedures and expecting employees (from the five different generations) to follow them with little to no training is very problematic and ineffective. These organisations need to seek business partners to help them with this immediately as it is a body of work much larger than any one department and currently time is of the essence. This global event will change a lot of industries and business processes in its wake, to be better prepared in the future.
On the other end of the spectrum, organisations that have been digitally transforming both the way their people work and how they support them, have been able to execute this emergency change swiftly and thankfully Fusion5 is one of those companies. Roughly 18 months ago, we began our Office 365 and cloud journey to transform how our people work and a couple of months after that we began our Unified IT journey to transform how we support our employees. We are now in a position to stay operational and help our customers do the same.
There are three main company profiles we can assist:
Office 365 and Cloud:
There are a wide range of efficiencies that can be gained in this space, especially around Microsoft Teams and SharePoint which can facilitate working from home via meetings, multi-user document authoring, webinars, collaboration, conferencing and content sharing even with external users.
With Microsoft Modern Workplace solutions, your customers can improve employee productivity and satisfaction, and create more seamless communication and collaboration across locations and platforms while maintaining the security and integrity of systems and data.
The benefits offered by the Azure are unique and business-centered. To mention a few, they are:
IaaS benefits the organisation to build, deploy, and manage the apps in a quick and easier way. An organisation can launch the website or create a web app and maintain the infrastructure by customizing the cloud software.
Azure delivers an appreciable level of flexibility giving you the option to have functionality as required. You can pay as you consume, switch to Azure, accommodate the business fluctuations and, etc. Thus, there is no worry about the infrastructure all the time.
Azure is fast in terms of deployment, operation, and scalability. This gives a competitive advantage for the companies to adopt Azure. Being the most up to date cloud technology, the infrastructure and applications could be made agile.
The data stored is in compliance with the regulations which is very much helpful especially for the legal or the finance sectors. It is entirely built around the security and privacy demands that any of the business would readily take the venture.
It is known that Azure has several data centers and delivery points. It facilitates for faster content delivery, optimal user experience, store any data, and also able to share the data across the virtual machines as required at a reliable and faster rate.
The data on Azure is protected by the spy-movie environment. The data centers have two-tier authentication, proxy card access readers, hand geometry biometric readers, global incident response team. Thus hacking is reduced to a greater extent.
Unified IT:
This cloud based platform can be quickly applied on top of any existing IT tools your organisation possesses to immediately provide ICT teams the following capabilities to support and work with their remote users in this crisis:
This is a SaaS offering with built in intelligence, machine learning and natural language search to help you with proactive problem management. The only thing you need to do is deploy the cloud sensor to your devices after cloud tenant provisioning. The sensor can be deployed via SCCM or provided to the user as compiled installer to self-install. We are happy to conduct a proof of concept for you.
Performance Management:
Whether you are scrambling to dust off old Windows 7 devices in stockrooms or needing your employees to access their work virtual desktop from home PCs, we can help you ensure that your applications are responsive to your users’ clicks, so they can be. We can define user-and application-based business rules that allocate CPU, memory, and disk resources across all application-delivery mechanisms.
Users will receive optimal performance no matter where their desktops and applications are hosted, your organisation will be able to do more with less; more users per server, more lifespan for your aging devices and more savings on your cost of server hardware (up to 40%).
Gellu brings a wealth of experience to a role that demands a deep understanding of the service levels our clients expect and then leads our personnel accordingly to consistently deliver a great customer experience on all the projects and bodies of work we manage.
Gellu possesses strong business and commercial acumen, along with vast experience and knowledge in professional services and operations, which helps our customers stay aligned with their key drivers and deliver successful and profitable outcomes. He can also help you with your organisational change management and project governance needs as he is an active member of our own PMO.
Gellu is based in Melbourne and manages all our consultants and project resources across Australia and New Zealand, although very busy, he loves to engage with our customers and is extremely approachable. He is passionate about our Unified IT solutions and works closely with our sales, customer success and innovation teams to ensure that all handovers at key milestones are seamless for our customers.
IVANTI CLOUD FREE TRIAL
Until October 31 you can get you endpoints under control and manage their health, inventory and security through the internet, so you can continue operating during this crisis
FREE AGENTLESS PATCH MANAGEMENT PROOF OF CONCEPT
Quickly patch your employee’s Windows machines over the internet as they work from home and improve your security posture immediately.
Please contact your Unified IT Specialists to find out more:
Australia: Chris Haggerty Chris.Haggerty@fusion5.com.au or M +61 412 329 399
New Zealand: Glenn Archbold: Glenn.Archbold@fusion5.co.nz or M +64 21 901 872