The client
Workforce Extensions is Australia’s largest franchise recruitment network, with over 20 offices situated nationwide. The company provides tailored staffing solutions for many industries including Healthcare, Building & Construction, Manufacturing, Transport & Logistics and more.
Rapid disaster recovery and cloud transformation
In 2020 Workforce Extensions experienced a hardware failure from their incumbent provider that severely impacted their daily business operations. Their environment was not designed with high availability best practices, resulting in significant outages and business disruption.
Workforce Extensions urgently needed to re-establish foundational IT infrastructure services whilst simultaneously seeking a longer-term solution that would provide greater resilience, stability and performance.
Empyrean’s IT managed services remediation plan:
Empyrean proposed a comprehensive three-phase solution to address Workforce Extensions’ immediate needs and provide a foundation for future growth.
Phase One: Emergency Recovery
Within a three-day period, Empyrean successfully migrated and restored critical services to Microsoft Azure Cloud, including:
- File Share Services
- Azure Active Directory Services
- Windows Virtual Desktop Services
- Ops Manual restoration
- Mail history recovery from legacy on-premises Exchange environment to Office 365
This rapid response enabled Workforce Extensions to resume operations after just three days of downtime, despite significant challenges including corrupted Exchange databases that needed hard recovery procedures.
Phase Two: Transition to Managed Services
Following the emergency recovery, Empyrean set up a robust managed services framework to provide ongoing support and ensure stability, this included:
- Implementation of a dedicated support desk with multiple contact channels (phone, email, web portal)
- Set up of real-time monitoring and proactive alerting
- Configuration of automated ticket creation for system events and incidents
- Establishment of a comprehensive Service Level Agreement with priority 1-5 response tiers, including specified response and resolution targets
Phase Three: Environment Optimisation
After stabilising operations, Empyrean implemented a series of optimisations to align the environment with industry best practices, this included:
- Proactive management and monitoring of the Azure Cloud Environment and Azure VDI
- Continual service improvement and alignment to Microsoft and industry best practices for Azure, M365 and security services.
- Proactive management of backup and disaster recovery services
Outcomes
The successful recovery and implementation delivered the following benefits to Workforce Extensions:
- Highly available and resilient architecture that ensures continuous business operations
- Enhanced performance and improved end-user satisfaction
- Flexible services that can scale with business growth
- Mobility for staff to work and collaborate from any location
- Proactive monitoring with real-time alerting to prevent service disruptions
- Comprehensive backup and disaster recovery capabilities
- Regular service reviews and continuous improvement recommendations
Transitioning to IT managed services in 2025 and beyond
Since our first engagement in 2020, Empyrean continues to be Workforce Extensions’ IT managed services partner.To improve the overall security posture, enhance end user productivity and reduce ongoing monthly spend in Azure, Workforce Extensions commenced a process to transition the VDI based architecture to Modern Workplace architecture using Windows Intune to manage endpoint devices.In addition, the Essential 8 framework was utilised to uplift the security compliance of the organisation to Maturity Level 2 standard.
All endpoints were onboarded to Intune with a combination of Corporate and BYOD management profiles. Endpoints were hardened in line with Essential 8 controls, and the Microsoft 365 Secure score was uplifted.
Empyrean now proactively manages the security posture of the M365 environment and endpoint devices, to ensure continual compliance with the essential 8 framework.
By partnering with Empyrean for managed services, Workforce Extensions can focus on their core business whilst Empyrean oversees the ongoing management and operation of IT infrastructure services, providing peace of mind and a stable platform for future growth.
Partnering with Empyrean IT has been a game-changer. Their expertise and responsiveness across all aspects of IT gives us the confidence to focus on what we do best. They’re not just a managed service provider; they’re a true extension of our IT team.
