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This national engineering and asset advisory firm's managed hosting arrangement was in its final renewal year, and CAD-heavy engineering teams working from offices across the country were already feeling the effects of ageing, latency-prone infrastructure. A single, coordinated move onto a Microsoft-native Azure environment has changed that.
A managed services contract with the firm's long-standing hosting provider was in its final renewal year, with a hard expiry date. Underneath that deadline sat real technical debt: ageing, latency-prone infrastructure and an endpoint estate that was starting to hold back CAD-heavy engineering teams working from offices across the country.
Brennan designed and delivered a single, sequenced transformation, led by an Azure landing zone built to Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework, alongside a modernised endpoint fleet, cloud file storage and a modern voice and network layer, moving the firm fully off its legacy provider and onto a Microsoft-native stack managed by Brennan.
The firm exited its legacy hosting arrangement on schedule and now runs on an Azure landing zone managed by Brennan day-to-day. Brennan has since expanded the relationship, delivering a further Azure environment build-out under an ongoing managed services partnership.
This national engineering and asset advisory firm provides consulting, design and project delivery services to infrastructure and property clients across Australia, employing 300+ staff from offices in every mainland state, with its head office in Adelaide.
CAD, GIS and other bandwidth-intensive engineering tools are everyday tools of the trade for the firm's teams, making network and endpoint performance a genuine productivity factor rather than a nice-to-have.
For close to a decade, the firm's infrastructure had been hosted and managed by an incumbent provider. That arrangement had been extended for one final year, with the contract due to lapse in mid-2025, turning what might have been a routine renewal into a genuine decision point.
The deadline exposed problems that had been building for a while: latency and reliability issues in the hosted environment were increasingly visible to engineering staff running CAD and design tools from sites across multiple states, and the endpoint and network estate needed a genuine refresh rather than a patch.
With a hard deadline, a multi-site workforce, and more than one incumbent vendor relationship to unwind, the firm needed a partner who could run endpoint, storage, voice and cloud infrastructure workstreams concurrently rather than one at a time.
Brennan scoped the transformation as one continuous program: a fixed-price design phase followed by implementation, handing over into ongoing managed services, built around four coordinated pillars.
A three-subscription enterprise-scale Azure landing zone (Control Plane, Production and Development) under a single management group hierarchy, built to Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework and deployed across two paired Australian regions for resilience, with centralised shared services, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, role-based access control, tiered backup policies and automated cost-consumption alerts designed in from the start.
A modern endpoint fleet followed: Microsoft Intune and Autopilot for device management; the full Microsoft Defender suite rolled out across the estate and aligned to the ASD Essential Eight; and a broad, staged application-packaging program covering the firm's real-world software catalogue.
Legacy on-premises file servers were retired in favour of cloud-based file storage, with a structured migration of departmental content into SharePoint.
Microsoft Teams Calling replaced legacy telephony, data links were replaced, and legacy WAN-optimisation hardware was decommissioned across every site.
The firm exited an ageing, latency-prone hosted environment ahead of its contract deadline and now runs on an Azure landing zone built to Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework, alongside a modernised endpoint, storage and voice environment, delivered as one continuous program and handed to Brennan's managed services team to run day to day.
The transformation met a hard, vendor-driven deadline across endpoint, storage, voice and cloud infrastructure in one coordinated program, rather than as separate, disconnected projects, with governance, security and cost controls built into the Azure landing zone from the start rather than added on later.
The relationship has kept growing since go-live: Brennan now manages the Azure environment on an ongoing basis, with the support agreement actively varied as the firm's needs evolve, and has since delivered a further, standalone Azure environment build-out for the firm, completed and formally signed off.
Brennan continues to manage the Azure environment day to day under an active, evolving managed services agreement, and has already delivered one further Azure environment expansion since the original transformation closed, a sign the relationship is set to keep growing as the firm's needs change.
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Partner with us for reliable IT support. Contact us now and find out how we can streamline your IT needs!