- IT Support Brisbane
Brisbane has more design and construction work in front of it than any Australian city has had in a generation. A 63,000-seat stadium at Victoria Park, Cross River Rail with first passenger services expected in 2029, and the venues and housing that sit around a 2032 Games. Every one of those projects arrives at a practice as a bigger model, a longer consultant list and a client security questionnaire. Your IT is either ready for that or it isn’t.
We’re NexSys, a managed service provider built for architecture, engineering and construction firms. Our Brisbane office is at 10 Eagle Street, five to seven minutes on foot from Central station, and our head office is on Collins Street in Melbourne. One provider, same engineers, same tooling and same standards in both cities.
- The service
Managed IT services in Brisbane that firms can size to Revit
The list looks like any Brisbane managed IT service provider’s list: proactive monitoring and remote monitoring of your IT infrastructure around the clock, a service desk with responsive support, patching, endpoint management, network security and firewall management, cloud services, backup and disaster recovery, Autodesk and Adobe licence management, all for fixed monthly pricing. Managed IT services Brisbane providers sell to accountants and law firms are built on assumptions about the IT environment, and the difference is in those assumptions, not in the support plans. A generalist provider sizes a workstation by budget, and a BIM model behaves nothing like a spreadsheet. Autodesk’s own Revit requirements recommend the highest single-core base clock speed rather than the most cores, so the sixteen-core machine on the invoice is often slower for a drafter than a cheaper eight-core one with a higher clock, and we size for the software instead.
Storage is the second place a generalist gets it wrong. Autodesk is blunt about file-based worksharing: the local copy and the central file need to be in the same geographic location, because the two exchange data constantly and that traffic isn’t built for the latency of a VPN. A Brisbane studio with a site office at Woolloongabba can’t just point both at a NAS in the CBD and hope. So we run streamed cloud storage for split teams. The person in the site shed and the person on Eagle Street open the same central model at the same speed.
Long Vo runs our service desk. He was National IT Manager at Hames Sharley before he joined us, which means the person triaging a failed model sync at 4.50pm on a Friday has sat on your side of that ticket, and the ongoing support you get afterwards is from the same small group who know your IT systems, not a rotating queue.
- Queensland
Two Queensland rules that reach your IT
The first is the BIM mandate. Since 1 July 2019 every Queensland Government construction project worth $50 million or more has been required to use BIM from the early planning phase. That’s a procurement rule, but it lands on IT, because a practice that wants a share of that work needs a common data environment, workstations that open federated models without stalling, and storage that can carry a 15-discipline federated model across two or three offices.
The second is IS18, the Queensland Government’s information security policy. Departments have to run an information security management system based on ISO 27001 and comply with the ACSC’s Essential Eight, and they attest to it every year, so when a department procures design services those expectations flow down the contract to you. Cameron Zad, our Director of Technical Services, has a view on this that some Brisbane providers would argue with. Design firms over-invest in perimeter tools and under-invest in identity, and a stolen password does more damage to a practice than a missed firewall patch, because the password opens the project drive and the firewall never did. So we start with identity.
In practice that means multi-factor on every account, conditional access that challenges a login from an unfamiliar country, and Autodesk’s named-user licensing tied to the same identity, so a departing drafter loses Revit the same hour they lose email. Most of it is already inside the Microsoft licences you’re paying for. It’s switched on, not bought.
- The number
What a bad week costs
The Australian Signals Directorate’s 2024–25 threat report puts the average self-reported cost of cybercrime for a medium business at $97,200, up 55 per cent on the year before. That figure is the average across every industry, and it counts direct losses, not the IT issues that follow. A design practice with a documentation set due on Monday is not the average. Yours is higher. Your exposure is the fee on the project that stalls, plus the Tier 1 client who reads about it.
Backup and disaster recovery is where most practices think they’re covered and aren’t. Most have backups, fewer have tested a restore of a live central model, and fewer still can show that a compromised account couldn’t delete the backup as well as the data, which is exactly what the Essential Eight’s second maturity level asks for. We build backups that are tested on a schedule and stored where an attacker with your password can’t reach them, run managed detection and response across every endpoint, and write the recovery time into the agreement, because business continuity is a number, not a promise. Sensitive data in a practice isn’t payroll, it’s the tender you haven’t submitted yet.
- Honest limits
Which Brisbane businesses we're wrong for, and whose business needs we fit
Two kinds of Brisbane firm shouldn’t sign a managed contract with us. The first is a studio of three people on laptops with no server, no central model and no government work; buy hours from a good local technician and call us when you hire the fourth drafter. The second is a business outside architecture, engineering and construction: our tooling and our team are shaped around design software, so a law firm, clinic or retailer will get more from a generalist, and we’ll happily name a Brisbane provider that does that well.
We’re also not the cheapest. Nobody serious is. A practice running Revit costs more to support than a generalist office, because the workstations, storage and backup are heavier. We quote from your environment rather than a rate card, and we show the number before anyone signs.
- Coverage
Remote support and on-site support, from Eagle Street to the site shed
Remote support lands the same day. Hardware, cabling and site-office connectivity are done in person, from Fortitude Valley studios to Woolloongabba and the northern growth corridor, with regional Queensland project sites covered by arrangement, and that local knowledge is what makes the difference between a two-hour fix and a two-day one. Construction site networks are a specialty of ours rather than an afterthought: temporary, secure, with time-bound contractor access that expires when the contract does. And if you already have an internal IT department, co-managed IT means they keep the day-to-day and we take the IT infrastructure, infrastructure management, security tooling and the 2am pages, with a dedicated team on our side who know your systems.
- Before you call
Questions Brisbane businesses ask first
Do you have engineers in Brisbane or is it all remote from Melbourne?
Both: most tickets are fixed remotely because that’s faster, and the engineer who picks it up is the same one in Brisbane as in Melbourne. Hardware, cabling and site-office work is done in person from Eagle Street.
What does managed IT support cost in Brisbane?
A practice running Revit costs more to support than a generalist office, because the workstations, storage and backup are heavier. Book a strategic review and you’ll get a written summary of what we’d change and what we’d leave alone, with a number against each.
What's the difference between managed IT support and break-fix support?
Break-fix support is a technician by the hour after something fails. Managed IT support is a proactive approach for a fixed fee: continuous monitoring, ongoing maintenance, proactive support before the failure and a plan for the next upgrade. The business keeps running smoothly, and IT management stops being a director’s second job. Most professional services firms in Brisbane make the change past about fifteen staff.
Can you take over from our existing systems and provider without a rebuild?
Usually. We audit the existing systems first, keep what works, and move the rest in stages with minimal disruption, and the experienced professionals doing it have done the same for Melbourne and Sydney practices of the same size. A rebuild is the exception, not the sales pitch.
Book a Strategic Review
A discovery call, a look at your environment, and a written summary of what we would change and what we would leave alone. No deck. No follow-up sequence.
- Tell us what's going onThree short steps, about a minute. No sales deck.
- A consultant gets back to youWithin one business day, by phone or email, whichever you pick.
- You get it in writingWhat we'd change, what we'd leave alone, and what each costs.
Autodesk Elite Partner · Supporting AEC firms since 2013 · Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth