MARS RECRUITMENT Case Study

MARS Recruitment was founded in 2008 with their head office in Perth with two employees.  They quickly expanded and added offices in Sydney and Melbourne and grew to a business of 60 employees. They specialise in Accounting, Business Support, Banking, IT, Engineering, Sales and Marketing and Healthcare Recruitment.  Over the past 12 years their IT infrastructure and support services had become inefficient, unorganised and varied in each state.  They had reached a point that too much frustration was being caused by having lengthy periods of downtime and continual speed issues, coupled with an expensive and underutilised IT support service.

We were approached to conduct a review and audit of MARS Recruitment’s current IT services and provider due to the ever-increasing hardware, software and support costs for the business across their three offices.  The business requirement was to identify areas of inefficiency and cost reduction along, with standardisation across all locations.  Our approach undertaken was to review the business as a whole and understand where the Recruitment industry was heading with regards to a Cloud-first approach.

Once the review was completed, we were engaged to implement the strategy of a Cloud-first approach with a view of completing all changes from a historical on-premise environment to that of a Modern workplace.  This has been broken down in the following high-level areas of improvement: Audit, Modern Workplace, Core Business Application – Azure, Core Business Application – Software as a Service.

Audit: Review of the current environment

The purpose of the audit was to review MARS’ current IT set up which included existing physical software and hardware, support contracts, reviewing the telephone and internet providers and core business applications.  We used a holistic approach to encapsulate all site office’s and to standardise the IT throughout.  Areas that were highlighted had to take into consideration the concerns of the Directors which focused on ensuring the privacy and security of data during the entire process and going forward which was a vital part of their short and long term plan.

Modern Workplace: Migrated internal network to Microsoft365

Upon completion of our review and working closely with the Financial Controller, we established a short to medium term migration and rollout plan.  Adopting the Microsoft 365 platform as the standard allowed us to quickly implement a secure, mobile and cloud-first approach to their IT environment.  Utilitising Microsoft 365 Enterprise we migrated all on premise hardware, on premise email, file data and core business applications to the main pillars on the Microsoft 365 Platform: Azure Active Directory, Intune, Exchange Online, SharePoint, OneDrive for business and Azure IAAS.

Mars have since been able to benefit from working remotely and collaborate using tools such as Microsoft Teams when required by the business.  They have also been growing their mobile device fleet and benefiting from their Mobile Device Management Solution around security and encryption.

Core Business Application: Migrated Core App to Azure – On Premise to Azure

Mars was using a legacy in-house recruitment specific application which was hosted in an environment that became very slow and had regular performance issues which affected the productivity of staff and caused a lot of frustration on a daily basis.  We worked closely with the provider to ensure that we came up with a solution that increased the speed of the application and eliminated the regular interruptions to daily tasks that staff needed to carry out to do their job.  A further aim was to create an environment where working out of the office was not only easy but ensure the company’s data was protected. 

Technology Tree provided consolidation and migration of this legacy environment to a virtual environment hosted with the Microsoft Azure Platform.  This allowed the business to remove physical hardware from their locations throughout Australia and remove the expense of leased, aged and unsupported hardware.

Staff were then able to have full access to the stored files and the legacy application from various business restricted locations and provided positive feedback as to how this allowed them to work more efficiently, whilst also allowing flexibility in their working environment.

Core business application: migration to a Software as a Service application called Bullhorn

The culmination of the IT strategy which we created at the start of our engagement continued as the business realised the benefits of Cloud adoption.   As part of Technology Tree’s consulting services, we were engaged from the start of this project and worked alongside the business, Kyloe Partners and Bullhorn support to help deliver this project safely and securely.  We adopted Microsoft best practices for Single sign on utilising the Microsoft Identity management of Azure Active Directory. This allowed the business to manage with one set of credentials across all platforms.  It reduced the administrative overhead with managing multiple identity management systems, and thus reducing the pressure on the Mars team. 

Mars have since been able to add additional SAAS features with their Core business application and are now a Cloud-first approach environment.  They have also been growing their mobile device fleet and benefiting from their Mobile Device Management Solution around security and encryption.

Summary

Now that the major improvement work has been completed with Mars we are now able to provide immediate support when required to avoid any downtime whilst also focusing on providing further efficiencies using Microsoft analytical tools that identify trends and can help us to implement changes and updates that are required.  By adopting the Microsoft Threat Protection strategy we have also provided the business with a piece of mind security solution that protects them not only from external threats but also with their internal staff awareness program.

Mars can now focus on their core business rather than spending time on IT issues and their staff are more mobile – IT now just works!