How a Melbourne Accounting Firm Eliminated IT Downtime During Tax Season

The Challenge

The firm had an ageing on-premises server that was the single point of failure for their entire practice. During the EOFY period, with all 30 staff simultaneously lodging tax returns and processing end-of-year payroll, the server would routinely slow to a crawl or fail outright. In the worst incident, a full server crash during late June cost the firm nearly two business days of productivity at the most critical time of the year, with client deadlines missed and staff working evenings to catch up.

Remote access was practically non-existent. Accountants who needed to work from home during the COVID era had patched together a collection of workarounds that were slow, unreliable, and entirely undocumented. When staff needed to access client files remotely, they frequently called the office asking colleagues to email files across, an approach that created version control issues and raised legitimate questions about data security and Privacy Act compliance.

Security had never been formally addressed. The firm had been contacted by a client whose email account had been used to send a phishing email, an early sign that credentials were already compromised. There was no multi-factor authentication across the practice, no endpoint protection, and the managing partner was unable to answer basic questions from a large client's procurement team about their data security controls.

There was also no tested disaster recovery plan. Backups were being taken to a USB drive that sat next to the server. When this was pointed out, the response from the then-IT contractor was that it had always been done that way.

The Solution

SuperStack IT conducted a full infrastructure assessment before proposing any changes, identifying the single points of failure, the security gaps, and the compliance exposures. The proposed solution moved the firm entirely off their on-premises server onto Microsoft Azure, with Microsoft 365 for email, SharePoint for document management, and Azure Virtual Desktop for the few specialist accounting applications that had not yet been updated to run natively in the cloud.

The migration was planned around the firm's quiet season, from late August through to October, with a phased rollout that kept a hybrid environment operational throughout. All 30 users were migrated in a single weekend cutover, with SuperStack IT engineers on call the following Monday morning to handle any issues. There were none of significance.

Alongside the infrastructure migration, SuperStack IT deployed Defender for Business across all endpoints, enabled multi-factor authentication across all Microsoft 365 accounts, configured email filtering and anti-phishing policies, and implemented a documented backup and disaster recovery process with automated daily backups to Azure Blob Storage and a quarterly tested recovery procedure.

A pre-EOFY health check was established as an annual engagement. In the weeks before June each year, SuperStack IT reviews system performance, verifies backup integrity, applies any outstanding patches, and ensures licences are correctly provisioned for any staff changes during the year. The first health check identified and resolved a SharePoint permissions issue that would have caused access problems for two team members.

The Results

The contrast with the previous two years was significant. In the first EOFY after implementation, the managing partner noted that it was the first June in five years where IT had not come up once in their weekly partner meeting. Staff who had previously dreaded the peak period because of IT problems adjusted quickly to the new environment. The cloud infrastructure handled the concurrent workload without issue, and the firm's remote workers reported that working from home was now functionally identical to working from the office.

Client Testimonial

“We had written off June as a nightmare IT month every single year. The first EOFY after the migration came and went without a single IT issue. Our team noticed immediately, the conversation shifted from managing problems to just doing the work.”