The challenge
DB Consulting Engineers was a long-established engineering consultancy, founded in 1995, with its main office in Taupō and a second branch in Hamilton. When we started working with the firm in 2020 its technology reflected its history: email on a legacy platform, files on local servers in the office, and a FreePBX phone system on a box in the corner. The setup had served the firm well for years, but it meant two offices working from separate equipment, staff who could not easily work away from their desks, servers and a PBX that were single points of failure, and little control over what was installed on company computers or who could get into email. The partners wanted to get out of the server-room business, let both offices work as one, and know their systems were secure.
What we did
We planned and ran the migration in stages, so the business kept working throughout:
- Email to Microsoft 365, with every mailbox moved and multi-factor authentication turned on for all accounts
- Files from local servers to SharePoint, restructured so both offices worked from the same documents and access was controlled by role
- Microsoft Teams for communication and meetings between Taupō and Hamilton
- Phones from on-premises FreePBX to cloud-hosted 3CX, keeping the firm's numbers and removing the hardware in the office
- Firewall and network set up for the offices, with the servers retired
- Devices enrolled in Microsoft Intune, so company computers were used for work only, staff could not install unauthorised software and a lost device could be wiped
- Endpoint protection and email security, with filtering for phishing and malicious attachments
The results
The firm no longer depended on a server and a PBX in the office. Email, files and phones were in the cloud, so staff in Taupō, in Hamilton, on site or at home worked with the same tools and the same company number. Devices were managed and protected, email was secured with MFA and filtering, and a firm that had run on the same equipment for years moved to a modern, managed environment without disrupting its engineers.