Australian Recruiting Group has quickly grown from a small business to a large company employing over 100 people. While cheap, consumer-grade internet connections were able to see them through their early years of business, the downtime and slow speeds they delivered became a liability.

A lot can happen in ten years. Australian Recruiting Group is living proof of that. The privately-owned firm provides recruitment and human resource consulting services to clients across Australia, and it’s now growing rapidly.

Directors David Young and Greg Nicholson both had a long background in recruitment when they teamed up and started a small company. Someone needed to look after blue-collar workers, right?

In the early days, every office sourced its own cheap, unstable internet connection, with no backup or capability to expand. Because they were a small business, they had no real network or connectivity plans in place. This meant frequent connection dropouts, resulting in downtime every month. When the network was up, speeds were inconsistent and data lags were the norm. They realised they’d need to  abolish ad-hoc consumer network use and start planning for the future with a stable, seamless network.

Ten years later, Australian Recruiting Group is now a well-connected outfit with almost 100 employees. From humble home office beginnings to multiple headquarters in Melbourne and Manila, their secret has always been the ability to work efficiently while protecting confidential client data.

In the recruitment world, a reliable, stable and secure network connection is vital. Bringing together remote offices, payroll management, time sheets, invoices and industry-specific applications involves
a lot of moving parts. The now-thriving company needed a technology partner they could trust to keep them connected while allowing space and support to sustain continued growth.

The outcomes of the move to SD-WAN have been tangible: applications run more smoothly and systems open up faster, with every minute saved adding up to create big benefits. This efficiency means employees can do their jobs without having to worry about frustrating connections or troubleshooting.

Australian Recruiting Group’s ICT manager, Kiki Lwin, is a big fan of SD-WAN. “I’d like SD-WAN to be used on all our sites”, he said. “Looking at the data, you can see a big improvement. It’s really noticeable when it comes to applications: for example if you open our payroll system, it just runs quicker. For our staff and our customers, this means an increase in productivity and turnaround.”

David and Greg’s focus on security hasn’t changed since the day they opened their doors. They’ve made sure Australian Recruiting Group is in good hands when it comes to protecting the confidential contact information, resumes, and banking details that go hand in hand with recruitment. SD-WAN dynamically and automatically refreshes encryption certificates, so their data is secure regardless of which link it travels on. Knowing there are no weak spots for hackers to exploit, David and Greg can sleep at night.

With the increased speed, stability and flexibility of SD-WAN, Australian Recruiting is able to use more cloud based solutions.

“With SD-WAN, there is a big improvement in uptime. We use a networking tool which looks at all the data and I can tell you that the latency has improved. Everything is 10 to 20 per cent quicker,” Kiki explained. “latency has gone down from about 30ms to 23ms. It’s a lot better than the previous technology we had.”

Previously, changing the configuration at any office required a technician on site to make manual changes. Now, everything’s done remotely in the Orchestrator, freeing up limited IT resources.

SD-WAN is already paying off for Australian Recruiting Group, and it shows no signs of stopping. It provides continued support for their plans of upgrading the payroll systems, hiring more people, moving to cloud-based systems and further business expansion. With their outdated technology finally replaced, they’re free to concentrate on providing top quality professional services to their clients. And better jobs for Australians is something we can definitely subscribe to.