Managed IT Support for Australian Business
An experienced, Sydney-based service desk that keeps your systems running and your people working. Our support is ITIL-aligned, secured to the ASD Essential Eight, and based entirely in Australia.
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RESPONSIVE, LOCAL IT SUPPORT THAT SCALES WITH YOU
When you need
You want a team in your timezone who can fix things, not a ticket number in an offshore queue.
Your current provider has stopped keeping up and you need a clean handover with no gaps.
You have IT projects to deliver but no spare hands to deliver them.
You are ready to move email, files or applications to Microsoft 365, Azure, GCP or AWS.
You need your systems patched, monitored and aligned to the Essential Eight.
You want a vCIO or part-time IT manager to plan ahead, not just keep the lights on.
RESPONSIVE, KNOWLEDGEABLE AND LOCAL
Support that lets you do what you do best
PicNet has supported Australian organisations since 2001. Our engineers are based in Sydney and chosen as much for how well they communicate as for what they know. You get people who explain the problem in plain language and fix it, whether that is over the phone, remotely, or on site.
Most clients work with us on a monthly retainer. You get planned maintenance, monitoring and a clear escalation path, with Priority 1 incidents covered after hours on call. We deliver nationally from Sydney and keep all of your data in Australia.
We tailor the service to your environment
- Remote and on-site support
- vCIO and part-time IT manager
- System monitoring and alerting
- Backup and disaster recovery
- Cloud management (Microsoft 365, Azure and AWS)
- Hardware and software supply
- Monthly IT governance meetings
A CLEAR FRAMEWORK, AGREED WITH YOU
Service levels you can hold us to
Every managed services agreement includes a service level agreement. The priority levels below are our standard framework. We set the exact response times with you at the start of the engagement, based on how your business runs and what your operations need.
| Priority | What it means | How we handle it |
|---|---|---|
| P1 Critical | A complete outage or a security breach affecting your operations. | Our highest priority, with after-hours on-call response. |
| P2 High | A major loss of service with no workaround available. | Prioritised ahead of routine work during business hours. |
| P3 Medium | A partial loss of service with a workaround available. | Scheduled and tracked through to resolution during business hours. |
| P4 Low | A minor issue or a general request for information. | Handled in the normal support queue. |
Priority 1 incidents are covered after hours through an on-call arrangement. Business hours are 9:00am to 5:00pm AEST, Monday to Friday.
A STRUCTURED HANDOVER WITH NOTHING DROPPED
Switching from your current provider
We collect it all
We gather the documentation, network diagrams, credentials, vendor contracts and asset registers from your existing provider.
We check it against reality
We audit your infrastructure independently and confirm the documentation matches your live systems.
Meeting with existing provider
We meet with the incumbent to clarify any questions and finalise a timeline for hand over and period for when we are able to still ask them questions.
We take over
We change admin credentials, take full responsibility, and start taking support requests from you, and notify your vendors of the new arrangements.
Careful monitoring
During this brief period where we are providing real support we will confirm all admin credentials have been transferred, roll out our monitoring agents, configure our service desk documentation and set performance baselines. During this time we may send questions to your previous provider.
We close the gaps
We review the transition after a month to find and fix anything that was missed.
PROACTIVE MANAGEMENT FROM A SENIOR TEAM
What a PicNet managed service includes
Incident, change, problem and supplier management through Jira Service Management, with a CMDB and SLA tracking.
Monthly governance meetings, monthly reports on ticket volumes and resolution times, and six-monthly strategic reviews.
We align your environment to the ASD Essential Eight at Maturity Level 2, with a 48-hour patch target for critical vulnerabilities.
Image-based backups through Datto, with an annual disaster recovery test so you know a restore actually works.
Availability and performance monitoring through ConnectWise and PRTG, with patching and remote diagnostics.
A senior consultant acts as your virtual CIO, maintaining a risk register and planning your IT a year or more ahead.
ORGANISATIONS THAT TRUST US WITH THEIR IT
Some of our Case Studies
GOOD IT MANAGEMENT COMBINED WITH PROACTIVE SUPPORT
Good management and support are central to any successful IT operation. As the needs and complexity of a business develop, so do the requirements of the “IT Manager”. IT Support must be proactive and responsive, the former to maintain and reduce the likelihood of system outage and the latter to reduce the amount of downtime in the event of an outage or issue.
For years the CYCA's approach to IT support was a purely reactive “break fix” model. Over the long term this resulted in user frustration and more IT downtime as underlying problems were rarely addressed. Furthermore a lack of IT Management to advise on and drive an IT strategy resulted in an array of fragmented IT services and solutions that did not deliver value to the business as a whole.
PicNet now runs the complete IT service desk and infrastructure for the CYCA, including their Microsoft Azure environment, delivered through remote support and monthly on-site visits. A senior consultant acts as the club's virtual CIO, maintaining the IT roadmap and coordinating vendors for systems such as access control and CCTV.
LOCAL SUPPORT GIVES A HUMAN FACE TO GLOBAL CORPORATE IT
Multinational companies reduce the cost of IT by centralising their IT operations to take advantage of economies of scale. However this risk alienating some of their regional users in smaller offices who for various reason expect a more personal and localised IT support. The advantage to the business and to IT is that localised IT support gives a human face to what can be at time a faceless machinery and shows to users in these regions the business cares about their experience as well as providing the global IT team with more technical capabilities in their regional offices.
Indivior are a multinational pharma with their global service desk and IT team based in the US. Their local sales, marketing and finance team having seen the benefits of having onsite local IT support, needed a partner to provide part time onsite IT support for their local users and to assist their global IT Team in the implementation of projects.
PicNet provided regular onsite IT support to supplement this multinational pharma's global (offshore) IT service desk. PicNet's onsite presence provided local staff with a superior user experience and also the global IT team with a knowledgeable and local resource to undertake more complex hands on IT tasks.
SELECTIVE OUTSOURCING TO REDUCE MANAGEMENT OVERHEADS
Often it is not always better to do everything “in-house”. Activities to “keep the lights on” are essential to IT operations but do not add real value to the business. In lean companies with very little management overhead, it is easier to outsource service desk and infrastructure management to service providers such as PicNet, leaving their internal IT team to concentrate on other activities that will add value to the business.
Greens, an FMCG specialising in foods had a small but highly skilled IT team. With acquisitions of new business occurring every few months their challenge was how to deliver value to the business by delivering IT projects whilst at the same time maintaining a high level of IT support for its users.
Green's IT service desk function was outsourced to PicNet so that their IT team could concentrate on delivering higher value projects to the business. PicNet's team functioned as an integral part of Green's IT department.
FULL IT OUTSOURCING
For some companies it makes sense to fully outsource their IT function. This is especially true when the business is in a state of growth and managing an Internal IT team and growing it will be a major undertaking requiring lots of management time. Outsourcing your entire IT brings with it risks, but these can be managed if the business has an IT Manager that is both technology savvy and able to work with the business to develop an IT strategy that can then be implemented by the outsource service provider.
DMS Maritime was a growing organisation. Their core business was providing a range of maritime related services to Defence and other Australian government agencies. Although IT was critical to the operations of their business, it was not their core business and management wanted to keep their IT department as lean as possible whilst still providing their users with responsive and modern IT services and support.
For a period of over 10 years, PicNet functioned as DMS Maritime's (DMS) IT department, providing a team of engineers and analysts and to support and manage all of DMS’ IT infrastructure and provide support to hundreds of DMS' staff in over a dozen location around Australia. This allowed DMS to only have an IT manager as their single internal IT staff, acting in a management / director role to drive the IT strategy.
WE REMOVE TECHNOLOGY AND TEAM BOTTLENECKS
Sometimes when an organisations projects scale faster than their ability to scale technical leadership and internal infrastructure, they reach a bottleneck. Here is how we helped Transport NSW remove just such an issue.
Transport for NSW was expanding rapidly tackling multiple huge infrastructure, engineering and technology projects simultaneously. This resulted in the inability to scale its technical leadership and resources along with its projects.
PicNet provided technical assistance with Senior IT Consultants able to work with ServiceNow, Splunk and others. Also, we helped with AWS management and design as well as project management services.
BECAUSE TECH DOESN'T ALWAY DO WHAT WE WANT IT TO
As the technological dependence of companies continues to grow, its easy to forget that supporting those technologies internally will need to grow at an even faster rate to ensure your teams are helped and not hindered by the tools they use every day. Novartis Australia needed help building out its help desk to ensure team satisfaction and Productivity.
Novartis Australia has continued to innovate and grow its use of technology underpinning its large and successful pharmaceutical business. As technology takes over more and more of your staffs roles and lives, so too will the frustration when those tools become an impediment to success rather than springboard to growth. Novartis Australia was facing exactly this issue.
PicNet provided superior augmentation services to Novartis Australia in the local Help Desk service, with up to 5 Engineers at the time helping their teams to save more time, avoid frustration and use their time more productively without the downtime of IT problems.