- IT Support Melbourne
Most managed IT services Melbourne firms are offered look the same. A service desk, a per-seat fee, a promise about response times. That works for an accounting practice. It doesn’t work for a studio where forty people open the same federated model at nine o’clock and the file server has to keep up, or for an engineering consultancy whose analysis runs stall every time the backup kicks in.
- Who we are
An MSP built around the way architecture, engineering and construction firms work.
We’re NexSys, a managed service provider built for architecture, engineering and construction firms. We work from Level 27 at 101 Collins Street, a short walk from Parliament station. If you run a law firm, a generalist will serve you better, and we’ll point you at a Melbourne IT company that does that well.
- The workload
What managed IT support means when the workload is BIM
A managed service is only as good as the assumptions underneath it. Most IT support companies in Melbourne size a workstation by budget and treat a four-gigabyte Revit model like a large spreadsheet. But Revit runs most modelling operations on a single core, which Autodesk documents and most service desks have never read, so the machine you were sold with sixteen cores can be slower for your drafters than a cheaper one with a higher clock speed. We size for the software. Clock speed first, GPU for rendering, then everything else.
Storage is the second place generalist IT solutions fail. Central models need low latency more than raw throughput, and a NAS chosen for capacity will stall on sync and worksharing long before it fills up. For firms working across sites we run streamed cloud storage, which streams project data rather than syncing whole folders, so a drafter in Cremorne and one in Sydney are working on the same file at the same speed.
- The service
Managed IT services Melbourne practices get: proactive monitoring and IT management
A managed IT service provider takes ongoing responsibility for your IT environment for a fixed monthly fee, instead of billing by the hour when something breaks. That’s the whole difference from traditional IT support, and it changes the incentive. Break-fix earns more when your systems fail. A managed service earns the same either way, so the work goes into stopping the failure.
For Melbourne businesses that means four things in practice. Proactive monitoring of the IT infrastructure, servers, storage, firewalls and every workstation, continuous monitoring rather than a weekly check, with alerts going to engineers rather than to a mailbox nobody reads. That’s proactive support in the literal sense: the fix happens before the call. Patching and network management on a schedule you agreed to. Service desk support for your staff, which is the part most people picture when they hear managed IT. And IT management at the level above the tickets: a quarterly review of what broke, what’s due for replacement and what’s quietly drifting out of date.
Cloud services sit inside the same fee now. Microsoft 365 administration, user access, licence counts and the conditional access rules that stop a stolen password turning into a stolen project, because for most Melbourne organisations the cloud platforms are where half the IT systems now live. We treat cloud management as part of the environment, not an add-on with its own invoice.
- What's included
The managed IT services Melbourne businesses get from us
Monitoring around the clock
And a helpdesk staffed by people who know what a worksharing conflict looks like.
Patching around deadlines
Scheduled around submission deadlines rather than Tuesday nights.
Licence management
We’re an Autodesk partner, which means we can see your subscription position, stop you paying for seats nobody uses, and sort licensing without a third party in the loop. Same for Adobe.
Remote first, onsite when it's hardware
Remote support for most tickets, onsite from Docklands to Cremorne when it’s a hardware problem.
Security built to tender level
Essential Eight Maturity Level One or Two from the start, not the month before a tender closes.
After-hours cover
After-hours cover runs around the clock, remote and onsite, across Greater Melbourne. Our service is shaped around architecture, engineering and construction firms, so the person on the phone at three in the morning already knows what a central file is.
Outsourcing IT support from another provider to us takes about six weeks for a forty-seat firm, most of it spent documenting what the last MSP never wrote down. We run the old and new environments side by side for the final fortnight. Nobody loses a day on a live project because a DNS record moved.
- Local
Local support: remote first, onsite across Greater Melbourne
Most tickets get fixed remotely, usually faster than it would take anyone to drive to Cremorne. Remote support covers the password reset, the licence that won’t activate and the sync that stalled overnight. Hardware still needs a person, though, and so does a new office fit-out, so our support services include on site support across the CBD, Docklands, Southbank, Richmond and Cremorne and the inner suburbs, with regional Victoria by arrangement.
Local support matters for a design practice in a specific way. When a plotter dies the day a tender set is due, or a site office loses its link, the engineer who turns up has usually worked on your environment before. That’s the reason we don’t subcontract onsite work in Melbourne. The person on site and the person on the phone are on the same team.
- Security
Cyber security that survives a tender
Two frameworks come up in almost every tender an architecture practice in Victoria responds to now. The ACSC’s Essential Eight, which defines three maturity levels, and ISO 27001, revised in 2022. Most of the Melbourne firms we work with need to evidence Maturity Level One or Two for government and Tier 1 builder work. We build to those levels from the start rather than retrofitting the month before a tender closes. The retrofit is always dearer and usually rushed. Cyber security for Melbourne businesses now is less about exotic cyber threats and more about evidencing basic controls to a client who asks.
Cameron Zad, our Director of Technical Services, has a view on this that some of our competitors would argue with. It’s that design firms over-invest in perimeter tools and under-invest in identity. 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 identity and access is where we start, before anyone buys another appliance.
In practice that means multi-factor on every account, conditional access so a login from an unfamiliar country gets challenged, and Autodesk’s named-user licensing tied to the same identity so a departing drafter loses Revit the same hour they lose email. None of it is exotic, and it will improve security more than any of the cybersecurity solutions sold as a box. Most of it is already in the Microsoft licences you’re paying for.
Multi-factor on every account
The control the Essential Eight and Autodesk’s named-user licensing happen to agree on.
Conditional access
A login from an unfamiliar country gets challenged before it reaches the project drive.
Licensing tied to identity
A departing drafter loses Revit the same hour they lose email.
Already in your Microsoft licences
Most of this is switched on, not bought.
- Service desk
User support from an IT team that knows your environment
End user support is where most Melbourne businesses judge an MSP, and fairly so. Slow support is the complaint we hear most about the provider before us, usually followed by the same story: the ticket went into a queue, someone asked for the practice’s name twice, and the fix arrived after the deadline it was meant to protect. Reliable support is mostly about who is answering. Our service team knows your IT environment before you call, because they built the documentation for it in the first six weeks.
The desk handles the everyday: new starters, remote access, printers, the licence that won’t activate. Round the clock assistance covers the after-hours pages, and expert support escalates inside the same team rather than to a vendor. The aim is dull and specific. Keep the business running smoothly, keep business operations off the IT agenda, and make the business technology feel like reliable technology rather than a weekly argument.
- Recovery
Backup and disaster recovery for a practice that can't lose a central model
Every MSP in Melbourne sells backup. Fewer of them have restored a live Revit central model from it, and fewer still can show that a compromised account couldn’t delete the backup along with the project drive. That second test is the one that decides whether a ransomware attack is a bad week or the end of a project. We build backup and disaster recovery so it passes both: backups held off the primary network, immutable for a set period, and restored on a schedule with someone watching the model open.
Business continuity is the plan around it. Which business critical systems come back first, how long each can be down, and who calls the client. We write those numbers into the agreement as recovery point and recovery time objectives, per system, so the valuable data is protected to a level you chose rather than one a vendor defaulted to. The disaster recovery page covers how we test it.
- Cost
What managed IT services cost in Melbourne, and what moves the number
Managed IT is priced per user per month, sometimes per device, and the honest answer to what it costs is that it depends on four things you can count before you call anyone. The number of people. The number of sites. The security level your clients ask you to evidence. And whether you need after-hours cover or can live with business hours. A quote that doesn’t ask about all four is a guess, and so is one written before anyone has looked at your current environment.
The comparison a business owner usually makes is with an internal IT team, and that’s the right comparison. One good internal hire in Melbourne costs a salary plus super plus the tooling they need, and still can’t be on call every night or hold every skill. Managed services give you a team for less than that, with predictable costs, which is where the cost savings come from. For firms that already have someone in-house, co-managed IT splits the work so your internal team and internal resources go further instead of being replaced. And because infrastructure upgrades are planned a year ahead, the services cost doesn’t jump when business growth means a second floor or a second city.
- Co-managed
Co-managed IT, if you already have someone in-house
Roughly a third of the Melbourne firms we talk to have IT in-house, sometimes a full-time manager and sometimes a BIM lead who inherited the servers. Long Vo, who runs our service desk, was National IT Manager at Hames Sharley before he joined us, so he’s been the internal person on the other side of this arrangement.
We don’t ask them to step aside. Co-managed means your person keeps the day-to-day and the relationships, and we take the infrastructure, the security tooling and the pages at two in the morning. The split gets written down before anything starts. Ambiguity about who owns what is how tickets fall through.
Firms with a Melbourne studio and a second office interstate get the same arrangement in both. We have people in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, so the person who set up your Cremorne network isn’t the one who flies out to fix it. That matters more than it should.
- Choosing
How to choose between Melbourne managed IT service providers
There are dozens of IT service providers in Melbourne, from national firms with a Melbourne office to two-person shops in the suburbs, and most of their websites promise comprehensive support, scalable solutions and a deep understanding of your business. Those phrases, like “technology solutions” and “services partner”, don’t separate anyone. Architecture and engineering are professional services with a particular way of working, and the provider has to fit it. Three questions do the sorting.
First, who answers the phone, and have they seen your software before? A support team that has never opened a Revit model will learn on your time. Second, what does the agreement say about security posture, in numbers, and who assessed it? Cyber security controls that nobody has tested are a line in a brochure. Third, will they tell you what not to buy? An IT partner is useful exactly to the extent that their strategic guidance is tied to your business goals and business objectives rather than their quarterly targets.
We’d rather be judged on those three than on a list of services. If the answers from us aren’t better than the answers you get elsewhere, pick the other provider. Our guide to IT providers for architecture firms names the ones we’d shortlist.
- Before you call
Questions Melbourne firms ask before they call
What's the difference between IT services and managed services?
IT services is a trade description that covers anyone who’ll fix a computer for an hourly rate. Managed services means a fixed monthly fee for a defined scope, monitoring included. The provider’s incentive is to stop things breaking rather than to bill for fixing them. The second model is the only one that works for a practice with deadlines.
What does co-managed actually mean?
Your IT person stays, we take the parts they don’t have time or tooling for, and the boundary is written into the agreement. It isn’t a stepping stone to replacing them, and most of our co-managed clients have had the same internal person for years.
What is a managed IT provider?
A managed IT provider, or managed service provider, takes ongoing responsibility for a business’s IT for a fixed monthly fee: monitoring, patching, backups, security tooling, cloud administration and a service desk for staff. The alternative is break-fix support billed by the hour, which pays the provider more when things go wrong.
How much is a managed service provider in Melbourne?
Managed IT in Melbourne is priced per user per month, and the figure depends on headcount, 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, because the four variables move the number more than the provider does.
Do you provide onsite support in Melbourne?
Yes. Most issues are fixed remotely, and our Melbourne engineers provide onsite support across the CBD, Docklands, Southbank, Richmond, Cremorne and the inner suburbs, with regional Victoria by arrangement. Onsite work isn’t subcontracted.
What are the major IT companies in Melbourne?
The large managed IT providers with Melbourne offices include national firms such as Interactive, The Missing Link and Kaine Mathrick Tech, alongside many smaller local MSPs. Which one fits depends on size and industry. Our guide to IT providers for architecture firms compares the ones AEC practices usually shortlist.
Talk to us
Book a strategic review and you'll get a discovery call, a look at your environment, and a written summary of what we'd change and what we'd leave alone. No deck. No follow-up sequence. Just the summary and a number.
- 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