Barry Plant & Business Continuity

Barry Plant is a successful real estate franchise with around 80 offices in metropolitan Melbourne, the Mornington and Bellarine Peninsulas, regional Victoria, Adelaide, and on the Gold Coast. The company’s foundation is built on uncompromising service, with a focus on providing the best customer experience to their clients. Barry Plant prides themselves on consistently delivering fantastic results. Their agents not only have an in-depth understanding of their local area, but they are also enthusiastic and passionate about finding the right buyer or tenant for their client.

However, while Barry Plant is an expert in real estate, they needed outsourced business-grade IT solutions in order to improve the efficiency and security of business operations in their Head Office.

“VITG has always been a proactive and dedicated partner in the development of our IT infrastructure. They have made what can sometimes be a maze of networking/hardware and software implementation, simple and straightforward. The procurement and implementation of new hardware has been seamless.” Bob Testro,    Franchise Manager Administrator

The Challenge

Barry Plant’s primary area of concern was their outdated email servers. Their existing system was at the end of its life and was slow, unstable, and unreliable — something that impacted business operations in their Head Office.

“Our biggest problem was with our email servers being old and outdated and not meeting the requirements of our growing business. We needed an upgrade and a team of experts to point us in the right direction,” says Bob Testro.

Aside from the need to upgrade their outdated mail servers, Barry Plant also did not have disaster recovery and business continuity systems in place to overcome the vulnerability of environmental problems such as power outages, cyber attacks, and other business-related disasters.

The Solution

Realising the potential risk their current IT infrastructure posed to the business, Barry Plant collaborated with VITG to implement a business-grade solution with the necessary redundancy required to ensure minimal interruption to their business emails. In order to do this, VITG partnered with a hosted cloud email provider and migrated all of Barry Plant’s emails from their local server to the cloud.

On top of this key project, a Datto business continuity appliance was commissioned to ensure that in the event of a local failure, Barry Plant would have the ability to get back online within minutes, either locally on the Datto appliance or in the Datto cloud.

“Throughout our time with VITG, they have assisted us with regular updates of our IT Hardware as well as advice on new server and network infrastructure when required,” says Testro.

For almost 20 years, Barry Plant has looked to VITG to plan, project manage, and implement change. This includes remote and on-site tech support, where VITG’s dedicated support team fixes any technical problems that the company faces, 24 hours a day, on all days of the year.

“VITG’s ticketing system allows us to track and review all jobs requested, but also offers us the opportunity of setting policies and rules in place for not just head office staff but all users across our large network of offices.”

The Results

Since 1999, Barry Plant has been using VITG’s business-grade IT solutions in order to be up-to-date with the latest IT solutions available in the market that are tailored to meet the business’s needs. As a result, Barry Plant no longer had to rely on local servers to support their email and can operate with a 99.999% assurance that their systems will not falter because of a scalable business continuity system in place.

“VITG has always been a proactive and dedicated partner in the development of our IT infrastructure. They have made what can sometimes be a maze of networking/hardware and software implementation, simple and straightforward. The procurement and implementation of new hardware has been seamless,” says Testro.

Through their partnership with VITG, Barry Plant has experienced the added advantage of having a team of technical experts available both remotely and on-site, meaning any problems they encounter are always managed professionally and efficiently.

“On the occasions when we have struck issues with our IT, the team at VITG has been able to either attend on-site or remotely in order to identify the issues and resolve them in an efficient manner. We now have the capacity to ‘set and forget’ the tasks previously performed by our staff at Head Office, which has relieved them to complete higher-end projects and tasks.”