Chris Radley (Fusion5)
Fusion5’s managed services team has helped its subsidiary EmpowerHR migrate its hosted platform off NTT's infrastructure and into a Microsoft Azure-powered system.
Offering foundations for software-as-a-service (SaaS) payroll and HR systems, the transition for EmpowerHR took six months to plan and execute, with Fusion5’s executive director Chris Radley labelling the process as “particularly risk averse”.
“Obviously some of them are very critical business processes. So it did take a number of months to get through that process and to do testing and all of the assurances,” he said.
“We leveraged the Azure Migration Program (AMP) and the Microsoft FastTrack team, so we had regular cadence there with them through the course of it, through the initial design phase, all the way to typical troubleshooting and escalation.”
Instead of going through customer-by-customer, the migration took all the configuration, storage and data that had been previously running on NTT’s systems and was instead replicated on the new Azure system.
“[That] has different challenges because it is scary to push the button because then you’re dealing with 50 odd servers that you have to go through runbooks and testing rather than just one customer, but it’s been fantastic to see it come to fruition,” Radley said.
Additionally, the new system has raised the subsidiary’s security standing, according to Fusion5 managed services general manager Kris Jackson.
“We’ve pretty much replaced all of the legacy security tools and systems that were in place on NTT, which includes deploying native Azure solutions like Azure Firewall, Azure Security Centre and Azure Defender as well as future plans for Azure Sentinel. Visibility across the board has significantly increased,” she said.
The end result has expedited the payroll process considerably, cutting the time required down to as much as a quarter, from four hours down to one.
“You’re actually talking about some really tangible time back in their day, in their staff’s day, in the business’s day. And they’re able to then fine tune their processes and do things quicker, more effectively, and utilise that time for other things," Jackson added.
Fusion5's work with EmpowerHR follows its implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Melbourne-based Manningham Council, with its contribution to that project being announced earlier this month.
