qwerti, a South African-owned Managed Service Provider, provided a leading South African engineering firm with a free assessment of its IT infrastructure to determine what was required to ensure the environment was capable of scaling with the company and improving overall performance. The result was that the firm selected qwerti as its new managed services provider (MSP) and completely revamped its security and environment functionality.
“It was actually quite a neat environment,” says Craig Allen, Manager: MIT IT Advisory at qwerti. “At first glance, there were no glaring risks but it could use optimisation and an improvement in the company’s overall security posture. However, we did discover that there were poor restrictions around user access which was compromising the company’s information and security. The company had rogue users abusing the network because it didn’t have the right restrictions or firewalls in place.”
The incumbent MSP had not detected that users were accessing the system, even those who had already left the company, and that there was potentially fraudulent activity taking place within the system. It was this revelation that decided the firm’s move to qwerti.
“We highlighted a number of key areas within the firm that needed remediation and unpacked other areas within the business that were working perfectly, essentially providing them with a clear picture of their IT estate and how they could manage and enhance it,” says Allen. “We proposed a radical improvement of user access and permissions, the inclusion of a firewall to improve overall security posture, and then increased controls to reduce network abuse that was eating up a lot of company bandwidth.”
The firm’s reduced bandwidth performance and capacity was not exclusively down to just ageing architecture – a number of employees were abusing network capacity for personal usage. The qwerti team also worked closely with the firm to ensure the transition from the existing MSP to their own services was as smooth and pain-free as possible.
“We set up project dashboards that highlighted risks and priority items and how we would mitigate these throughout the transition process,” says Allen. “We also created RACI documents so responsibility, accountability, communication and information were all visible and all stakeholders were identified. The client was kept up-to-date throughout, and we took over the support of high-risk items as a first priority to minimise risk and downtime. As soon as the previous MSP was notified that the contract was not renewing, we locked them out of systems that contained the firm’s intellectual property and confidential information.”
qwerti achieved each set milestone on deadline and consulted consistently with the firm to ensure deliverables met expectations. In addition, the entire move across to qwerti resulted in no downtime during work hours – everything was managed out of hours and nothing impacted operations. The firm has experienced consistent service delivery, improved bandwidth and capabilities, and seamless operational functionality within budget expectations.
