Archives

Customer background

Asiaworld Shipping Services Pty Ltd is an Australian owned shipping and freight company located at all Australian ports specialising in project and break bulk cargoes. They require immediate access to their email system to manage their shipments and day to day tasks.

Customer Challenge

After meeting with Asiaworld we found their storage capacity was overfilled as their server hard-drives were getting full quickly and they could not accommodate new emails with attachments. Adding storage to their network would have been costly and difficult for their IT team. The maintenance of large mailboxes had become problematic for them. When users moved from PC to PC they would start downloading their profile on the new PC. This would put stress on the server and cause network speed issues. Furthermore, employees found that the performance of outlook was dropping due to the limited network bandwidth and hard drive performance. Specifically, users with large mailboxes found that a normal keyword search query could kill the server and slowdown the performance for all other outlook users.

The upgrade, maintenance and patches for their mail server became difficult and occasionally caused unplanned downtime. This stopped all workflows within the company making it a nightmare for the IT team to deal with and costly for the company as employees would sit idle until the servers were back online. It was also bad for the IT team as they would have to put aside all important work as immediate high-end technical support was needed when something went wrong with the exchange server. Employees also had difficulty accessing some emails through the web due to different firewall rules to prevent intrusion. We found that some of their employees had a requirement for Skype for business or newer versions of the office suite of products.

Solution

As Asiaworld were already using Microsoft exchange, it was a natural step to consider moving to Office 365 Cloud Exchange. By moving to O365 Asiaworld could send emails with attachments with ease, as it used Microsoft storage servers in the cloud. Users moving around on different devices was no longer an issue as they could easily log on or set up their profile on any PC without difficulty. Users with large mailboxes no longer experienced significant lag and did not affect the efficiency of other users on the network when using their mailbox. Unplanned downtime of their email service no longer occurred due to accessibility and availability of Microsoft Servers. This allowed the IT team to continue working on meaningful projects rather than break-fix of servers. Web access of emails became incredibly easy for any user on any device from almost any location. Users were no longer locked out of using emails outside of the office due to firewalls. Asiaworld found that moving to Office 365 meant that their business ran more smoothly, with fewer bottlenecks and downtime. There was higher availability of their email service and better productivity of their team as they now had access to the latest version of Office Suite, built in apps and Skype for Business at all times.

Measurable Benefits

• Cost effective solution to move to Cloud compared to purchasing hardware
• Sufficient storage in the cloud
• Less work for the IT team for break fix issues
• Access to emails from any computer, anywhere at any time
• Higher performance
• No unexpected downtime from server crashes
• No more access issues due to security protocols
• Outsourcing all highly technical issues to Microsoft experts in their datacentres
• Always have the latest version of Office Suit, built in apps and tools

Customer background

Country State is one of Sydney’s most reputable and well regarded property development companies. Incorporated in 1992, they have since been helping Sydney-siders see the potential of investing in property. With developments such as high-rises, residential buildings, hotel suites and developments such as Glebe Gardens, they have come to prove to be leaders that produce unique concepts that meet their client’s needs.

Customer Challenge

After some discussion with Country State, we discovered that they were receiving high volumes of spam to their inbox and legitimate emails were going to their junk folders. The large amounts of spam was filling their local server disk space making it non responsive. Their emails could take up to 10 minutes to send due to the local internet speed dropping from the strain to the server. The emails that Country State were sending to their clients were incorrectly being classified as spam as their server was infected and was sending spam out to their contacts without their consent. This was a significant issue as they were not able to communicate with their customers with certainty. Because of this, their staff spent time chasing lost emails with clients to make sure they had not been categorized as junk. These issues were taking away time the staff should have been spending on more important tasks. After some further investigation we found that the antivirus software was not effective in stopping the spam and the management of the server and antivirus was costing them more time of their staff and money for upkeep.

Solution

After some consideration we recommended that they move to Office 365 to solve these issues. Country State were concerned that their data would be on the cloud and this may lead to security issues. To ease their minds, we provided them with the O365 security certificates and suggested a manual migration to O365 as there were five users. After moving them to the cloud, all spam ceased immediately. This was due to O365’s fraud protection which was able to stop mass amounts of spam. This in turn significantly improved their internet speed and the strain on their server. They were pleasantly surprised to see such a sudden change. After the migration, their domain was no longer sending spam to their contacts. As all packets were being sent through Microsoft servers, this allowed Microsoft to filter the packets and stop the issue of spam broadcasting. After a short period of time their domain returned to a trusted zone. Emails that were sent to customers were no longer being sent to junk folders. This freed up the employee’s time from chasing emails to spending time on more productive tasks. As packets were being sent directly to Microsoft servers to be processed, there was no longer any delay in sending emails.

Measurable Benefits

• Costs saved on antivirus
• SSL certificates no longer needed
• Less money on technical support
• Less money on server maintenance
• Less time spent chasing emails
• Storage space was reduced to 0
• IT Hardware costs were reduced
• Always using the newest version of software for both client and server sites with no need to upgrade