CASE STUDY · ACCOUNTING

Case study: a 52-staff
Brisbane accounting firm.

A family-owned Brisbane accounting firm was spending over $300,000 a year on IT — and still living with weekly downtime and offshore support that couldn't fix it. We re-engineered their cloud, saved them $180,000 a year, and cut downtime by 95%.

IndustryAccounting
LocationBrisbane, QLD
Employees52
THE SITUATION

Great firm, painful IT.

Our client is a family-owned Brisbane accountant that has grown to 52 staff through its personal touch and care, excellent customer experience, and quality accounting work for individuals and businesses. But their IT had become a hindrance and an annoyance.

They were spending over $300,000 per year on IT — and were frustrated by poor tech support, slow response times, and an old provider's team based largely offshore. The obvious question: why so many problems, despite spending so much on a cloud environment for servers and virtual desktops? Why was downtime a weekly occurrence? And why was it so hard to fix anything when the critical infrastructure went wrong?

THE CHALLENGE

A poorly engineered cloud, full of single points of failure.

The cloud is supposed to deliver redundancy, high availability, and no single point of failure. This one had been built to do the opposite.

$15k/month, benefits stripped awayThe old provider's cloud project cost $15,000 a month to run on its own — before all the extra networking and IT costs — yet stripped away most of what makes cloud worth it.
Static virtual desktopsDone right, a virtual desktop keeps your data separate from the working environment — if one breaks, the system spins up a fresh one and moves you across with no downtime or data loss. The old provider deployed fixed, static desktops that constantly broke and needed manual fixing.
Single points of failure everywhereInstead of a distributed system immune to any one server or desktop failing, single points of failure had been needlessly introduced throughout. The result: lots of downtime, lots of data loss, lots of money spent.
"The team at Clarity have been nothing short of incredible! Their attention to detail, calmness, knowledge and communication has been A-class. Clarity are not just an IT company, they are part of our team."— Practice Manager
WHAT WE DID

Audit first, then a cloud-first strategy that made sense.

An ongoing client of several years, this practice adopted our recommendations. A full audit, strategic review, technology roadmap and project plan set out a coherent path — one that demonstrated the benefits and saved real money, delivered by our 100% Australian onshore team.

LOCAL, PROACTIVE, TRUSTED

A 100% onshore support team.

Clarity only employs Level 2 and 3 technicians or above — no Level 1 offshore service desk. We hated the idea of you feeling like you're calling your telco, stuck on hold with an offshore team. Our 100% onshore model drives best-in-class, first-call resolution — and a high-trust relationship. This client even invites us to their annual staff party.

Tested in the real world. One of those single points of failure was realised just three weeks into working with Clarity. Our team worked 16 hours straight, Saturday through Sunday, to resolve it — the kind of commitment that turns a supplier into part of the team. It also proved exactly why the old design had to go.

CYBERSECURITY UPLIFT

Closing the gaps we found.

As is common with the small and medium businesses we meet, our audit, benchmarking and gap analysis shaped a cybersecurity strategy across reactive, proactive and preventative controls.

RESULTS & IMPACT

Less spend, less downtime, more capable.

$180,000+Saved every yearOngoing annual savings from retiring the over-priced cloud environment.
95%Reduction in downtimeWeekly outages became a rare exception, not a routine.
ZeroSingle points of failureThe fragile design that plagued them is gone for good.
Enhanced securityGaps closed across reactive, proactive and preventative controls.
Enabled staffWork from tablet, laptop or home computer — always with access to data and programs.
A trusted partnershipSo trusted they invite us to their annual staff party.
"A good IT experience is a strategic lever — this firm attracts and keeps top talent by enabling a superior team with superior tools. Clarity delivered them, breaking the firm free of legacy tech that was holding it back and costing it money."
EXPERIENCE AN AWARD-WINNING DIFFERENCE

Paying too much for IT that keeps breaking?

Book a free IT Health Check and we'll audit your setup, find the wasted spend, and show you what a leaner, more reliable cloud could look like.