Skillinvest's mission is to support the professional development and growth of individuals by placing them with businesses, was being hampered by its existing network solution. The primary problem was that the incumbent network provider couldn’t provide the transparency needed to diagnose network performance issues. The links were also expensive by current market benchmarks.

After reviewing competitive providers, Skillinvest selected Vocus to provide a major network uplift including upgrading links to fibre and implementing Vocus Managed SD-WAN to provide modern network management capabilities.

“When we were comparing vendors, Vocus stood out because its account managers were highly responsive. And I’m happy to say this has carried through before, during and after implementation. It is such a benefit compared to our previous provider to know that if we ever have an issue, Vocus will respond quickly and sort it out.”
Phil Mathieson, IT Manager, Skillinvest.

It wasn’t just painful for IT dealing with a legacy infrastructure that didn’t come with the toolset to easily diagnose performance issues. It was also very frustrating for the staff and students using it.

Vocus’ SD-WAN solution provided the tools needed to significantly improve the response times for support, with most issues now fixed remotely rather than the small number of IT staff having to travel to sites to fix problems.

The new system also brought greater visibility of security, with the ability to identify and respond to threats in real time.

The result was that staff were less frustrated overall with the infrastructure provided by IT. Applications and data at the institution now work smoothly and if an issue ever arises, it can be diagnosed and fixed quickly rather than having to wait for a technician to visit and troubleshoot.

“We now provide first class connectivity to everyone,” said Skillinvest’s Phil Mathieson. “Staff and students can work with high quality access to their apps and data regardless of their location – even if they’re working remotely, and we can assist them much more easily if they ever need support.”