Riverland Group
Established in 2006, Riverland Group operates six hospitality venues in Melbourne's central business district and the inner suburbs of Elsternwick and Brunswick. The venues offer a mix of bar and food services and cater for locals and visitors alike.
During the past few years, as the group grew in size and turnover, it became clear its existing data networking capabilities were no longer able to provide the level of support required.
The Group were in a private cloud with out-dated infrastructure and old hardware, so needed a new solution that not only improved performance and speed, but also firewall and network security. Riverland Group Finance Manager, Rohan Brodie, says the company had been reliant on ageing network links that were struggling to provide the level of performance and reliability needed in each venue and within the company’s head office.
Moving into a public cloud
A solution was designed to move Riverland’s existing
data into a public cloud and onto Microsoft 365. Security
firewall appliances would be implemented at each
venue with VPN links back to the Microsoft Azure
cloud where applications and data would be located.
Their infrastructure would also be overhauled and
improved to help enhance efficiency and productivity.
However, disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in delays to the project’s rollout. While work continued during the lockdowns, the final launch did not take place until late October 2021. During this time, itro was able to effectively pause the project implementation at no cost to the customer and with no need to re-scope when the project was finally able to resume.
“Although we were delayed, we were still very pleased that the initial design remained appropriate for our operations after the lockdowns were eased,” says Brodie. “Once work was able to continue, everything was completed in a very short period of time.”
The benefits
With the new VPN network links in place involving cloud solutions, Riverland’s staff had full function capacity that focused on performance and reliability with the level of advanced service to patrons. According to Brodie, this academic approach to project management was used to deploy an order from table to service to patrons who did not have to queue at bars to order food and drinks.
“The performance of this application is critical for our operations and it runs flawlessly via the firewalls and over the network links.”
New network infrastructure
Brodie says the new network infrastructure has also enabled the company to create a “work-from-anywhere” environment. Staff can move between venues and expect the same level of service while back-office staff are now able to work from any location including at home.
“This sort of flexibility is going to become increasingly important when it comes to attracting and retaining good staff,” says Brodie. “Seamless access to applications and data is essential for a company like ours.”
Partnering with a dedicated MSP
Brodie says having itro in place as the company’s
MSP means Riverland will be able to continue to
invest in new technologies and services as they
emerge in the future.
“We don’t have a dedicated in-house IT team and so itro provides us with the level of technical expertise needed to keep our infrastructure running. They also keep an eye on what we might need in the future as the business grows.”
At this stage, future plans include the use of SDWAN technology to provide fail-over networking
capabilities for each venue using public mobile
networks.
“Our venues are very reliant on network connectivity and having this capability in place will ensure we can serve our patrons efficiently at all times,” says Brodie. “At the end of the day, that’s what Riverland Group is all about.”
