- IT Support Sydney
Half the Sydney practices we talk to also have a Melbourne studio. Some started here and opened south, some the reverse, and a few are the Sydney office of a group headquartered somewhere else entirely. What they have in common is that their IT was set up one city at a time, by different people, and the seam between the two is where files go missing.
We’re NexSys, a managed service provider for architecture, engineering and construction firms. Our Sydney office is on Level 29 at 2 Chifley Square, a few minutes from Martin Place station, and our head office is on Collins Street in Melbourne. One provider, one identity system, one set of security policies and one way of doing things in both cities, with the same engineers reachable from either. That’s most of the pitch.
- The service
What managed IT support looks like when it's done for a practice
The service itself is the same as anywhere. Monitoring around the clock, a service desk, patching, backups, security tooling, and licence management for Autodesk and Adobe. The difference is who’s on the other end of the ticket. Russell Swainston, who works on our Microsoft and automation side, spent years as National Service IT Manager at Cox Architecture before joining us, and Noel Tippett, one of our senior engineers, came from HASSELL and Aurecon. When someone at a Sydney practice logs a call about a central file that won’t sync, the person picking it up has usually sat in that exact chair.
That matters more than the SLA, and it’s the thing no response-time table shows you. A generalist Sydney IT company will promise a response time and meet it, and then spend the first forty minutes of the call learning what worksharing is.
- What's included
Managed IT services Sydney businesses get for the monthly fee
A managed IT service provider takes ongoing responsibility for your systems for a fixed fee, which is a different job from a support provider who bills by the hour. The fixed fee is what pays for the work nobody sees, and our services cover it end to end: proactive monitoring and remote monitoring of every server, firewall and workstation, automated patch management on a schedule agreed around your deadlines, endpoint protection and email security on every device, and device management so a new starter’s laptop arrives configured rather than half-built.
Cloud services and cloud solutions sit in the same agreement. Microsoft 365 administration, user access and access management, multi factor authentication on every account, and the licence counts that drift upward when nobody is watching. For most Sydney practices the cloud platforms now hold as much as the office network does, so we manage the cloud environment as one environment rather than a second contract with a second provider. Vendor management is included too: when the internet link drops or the plotter supplier goes quiet, we make the call, not your office manager.
Ongoing support for staff runs through the service desk, and most tickets are resolved remotely inside the hour, which keeps day to day operations moving with minimal disruption. The service level agreements put response times in writing, per priority, so “urgent” means the same thing to both of us. The aim is to deliver reliable, responsive support from a single point of contact, keep the team productive and keep business operations off the IT agenda.
- Two cities
One provider across Sydney and Melbourne
Here’s the opinion a few of our competitors would push back on. A practice with studios in two cities should have one IT provider, one directory, one common data environment and one set of security policies, and any arrangement that splits those by city is a liability dressed up as local service. We’ve inherited enough two-provider setups to be confident about that. The handover between them is always where the project data gets duplicated, the permissions drift, and nobody’s quite sure which backup is current.
So when a Sydney practice comes to us with a Melbourne office already on someone else, we’ll say plainly that the value is in consolidating, and we’ll show the number.
- Sydney
Sydney-specific work
NSW Government tenders are the reason a lot of Sydney practices first take security seriously. We’re a registered supplier on buy.nsw, which means we’ve been through that process ourselves and know what the questionnaires ask. The ACSC’s Essential Eight, with its three maturity levels, is the framework most of them are written around, and Maturity Level Two is what a government or Tier 1 builder client usually means when they ask. The registration itself doesn’t win work, but it means the paperwork is done before a tender lands.
The other Sydney-specific reality is rent. A CBD or Surry Hills studio pays enough per square metre that a server room is an expensive way to store a NAS. Most of the Sydney practices we look after run their central files on cloud or streamed storage rather than on-premise hardware, and the workstations are sized so the office can shrink or move without a rebuild. We’ll still put a server in if the model sizes justify it. We just won’t assume one.
The third is the common data environment. Rick Notari, our digital platform lead, spent thirty years in AEC delivery at Hassell, Silver Thomas Hanley and Mirvac before he joined us, and his view is that a two-city practice without a single CDE isn’t sharing a model, it’s emailing versions of one. Setting that up properly, with one permission model and one naming convention across both studios, is usually the first piece of work we do for a multi-office client.
- Security
Cyber security and disaster recovery: enhanced security without the theatre
Cyber security for a design practice starts with identity, not with another appliance. Multi-factor on every account, conditional access, and admin rights that are separate from day-to-day logins. Those three security controls, on secure infrastructure, stop most of the attacks a forty-person Sydney studio will actually see, and they’re already in the Microsoft licences most practices pay for. The evolving threats that get the headlines matter less than the stolen password that nobody noticed for a month.
Disaster recovery is the other half. We hold backups off the primary network, immutable for a set period so a compromised account can’t delete them, and we restore a live central model on a schedule to prove it works. Recovery priorities are agreed per system before anything goes wrong: which critical systems come back first, and how long each can be down. That’s data protection a government questionnaire will accept, and it meets the security requirements NSW agencies now write into their tenders.
- Coverage
Rapid response: onsite and remote support across Sydney
Our engineers work out of Chifley Square, which puts every client site in the city within minutes and the rest of Greater Sydney within the hour. Remote fixes land the same day, usually well inside it. When it’s hardware, someone is on the way to your studio, whether that’s Surry Hills, Chippendale, Pyrmont or a Parramatta site office, and regional NSW projects from Newcastle to Wollongong are covered too. Our team is built around architecture, engineering and construction software, which is why the engineer who turns up already knows yours. The Sydney team is a local team, and the local team delivers fast because it’s ten minutes away rather than a flight, so on site support and remote support come from the same people.
- Cost
What managed IT services cost in Sydney, and where the cost savings come from
Managed IT is priced per user per month. What moves the number is headcount, the number of sites, the security maturity your clients ask you to evidence, and whether you need after-hours cover. For small and medium businesses the fair comparison is with hiring: one internal IT person in Sydney costs a salary, super and tooling, and still can’t cover every night or every skill. Managed services cost less than that and bring a team, which is where the cost savings are.
For a two-city practice the bigger saving is consolidation. Two providers means two contracts, two sets of tools and two sets of assumptions about who owns the backup. One IT partner across Sydney and Melbourne removes that duplication, and it usually pays for the change within the first year. It also means the IT doesn’t need rebuilding every time the business grows, which is where business growth usually gets expensive.
- Choosing
Choosing an IT service provider in Sydney
Sydney has no shortage of managed service providers, from national firms such as The Missing Link to single-office local businesses in North Sydney and Parramatta. Most of them will promise a comprehensive suite of IT solutions, skilled professionals, services built for modern businesses, and support that helps your business thrive and streamline operations. That describes everyone. Architecture and engineering are professional services with their own rhythm, and Sydney managed IT providers that support businesses like yours will know it. Three questions sort them.
Who answers the ticket, and have they worked in a practice like yours? What does the agreement say about security, in numbers, and who assessed it? And will they work alongside internal IT staff if you have them, rather than around them? A Sydney-based managed IT provider that answers those three well, and ties its advice to your business goals rather than its own, is worth shortlisting, whether it’s us or not. We’ve done this work for over a decade, and optimal performance for a practice still comes down to those three answers. If you’re a law firm or an accountancy, a generalist will serve you better than we will, and we’ll say so.
- Questions
Questions Sydney practices ask about managed IT
What does a managed IT service provider do?
A managed IT service provider takes ongoing responsibility for a business’s IT for a fixed monthly fee: remote monitoring, patching, backups, cyber security tooling, cloud administration and a service desk for staff. The alternative is break-fix support billed by the hour, which earns the provider more when things go wrong.
How much do managed IT services cost in Sydney?
They’re priced per user per month, and the figure depends on headcount, the number of sites, the security maturity you need to evidence and whether you need after-hours cover. We quote after a short look at the environment rather than from a rate card.
Do you provide onsite support in Sydney?
Yes. Most issues are resolved remotely, and our engineers at Chifley Square provide onsite support across the Sydney CBD and Greater Sydney, with regional NSW projects covered by arrangement.
Can you work alongside our internal IT team?
Yes. Co-managed IT means your internal person keeps the day-to-day and the relationships, and we take infrastructure, security tooling, disaster recovery and after-hours cover. The split is written into the agreement before anything starts.
- Next step
Talk to us
Book a strategic review and you’ll get a discovery call and a look at both offices if you have both. Then a written summary of what we’d consolidate, what we’d change and what we’d leave alone, with a number against each, so the decision to consolidate is made on cost and risk rather than on a sales pitch.
Call 1300 733 010 or use the form below.
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