Central Plains Water

Central Plains Water Ltd needed to migrate their users, data, licensing, voice, and IT systems from a shared IT infrastructure with Solid Energy New Zealand to their own independent infrastructure. With significant growth in the size, scale and complexity of their projects they needed a more robust business IT solution that would support the immediate and longer term business needs.

We helped Central Plains Water achieve a fully independent IT infrastructure that leverages the best of both in-house and cloud based systems. This included planning and implementation of new infrastructure and systems, and seamlessly migrating all existing data and users to the new systems.

Central Plains Water now have a scalable solution that is covered under a managed services contract to provide ongoing proactive IT support.

We worked with Central Plains Water IT support personnel and management to understand their existing environment and their future requirements. We then recommended implementing a server for running virtual servers, replacing aging leased laptops with new equipment, and consolidating and migrating from both a hosted Exchange email and an internal SharePoint intranet to Microsoft Office 365.

We investigated internet connectivity options for their location and recommended multiple VDSL internet links for data and voice systems. In provisioning a local virtual server solution, we allowed file storage to bypass site issues of expensive and limited internet connectivity options, while also allowing for any future additional server requirements without requiring the purchase of additional hardware. Office 365 provides a scalable solution for Exchange email and SharePoint intranet with huge allowances for data storage. Licensing for Microsoft Office, Visio, and Project is now all provided through Office 365 on an operational (rather than capital) expenditure basis.

We provisioned a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone system with IP based phones and local phone exchange connected over VDSL to a cloud based phone exchange. This offers reduced calling rates when compared with all the major telecommunications providers.

Our standard data protection and recovery, and layered security solutions were implemented, utilising monitored local and offsite disk based backups, with the protection of firewall and local installs of antivirus reporting into and monitored from the cloud.

We pre-configured an entire new environment from firewall, server, and network, right down to individual user logins on laptops. We migrated existing email, by running both old and new email systems in parallel and with data synching; following a quick final synchronisation of the latest email data at the time of cutover. We migrated all data from individual user profiles on desktop and mobile across to the new systems to ensure the most seamless cutover experience for end users.