New Zealand Fire Service National SecureME Rollout

Spark Digital called upon Think Concepts to assist with a countrywide router replacement project. This project involved kitting out all of New Zealand Fire Service’s volunteer stations with new VPN routers. Our nationwide branches allowed our technicians to coordinate site visits across the various regions in a highly effective manner, allowing us to complete the project in just 32 working days!

Through our prior coordination efforts with Spark Digital and NZFS, which included worst-case planning for all potential scenarios, our deployment went seamlessly from Cape Reinga to Stewart Island, even with the odd lack of service on our mobile phones. The NZFS goes to great lengths to protect their local community and we identified personally with the requirement that firefighters and support personnel receive the best resources available, in order to do what they do best.

The aim of the project was to bring all stations onto a modern network with central management and diagnostic capabilities. Standardising the network hardware and infrastructure will allow NZFS IT support staff to quickly diagnose problems remotely without requiring volunteers to sacrifice their valuable time to assist with troubleshooting work.

SecureME is a great solution for businesses of any size looking to reduce internet connection related interruptions through automated failover as well as troubleshoot and resolve issues with greater efficiency and visibility. This will translate to cost savings and quicker deployment of updates, improving security and reliability, as well as making it easier for staff to access online resources when otherwise they might be interrupted by outages not in their control.

We had a great time visiting some of the most remote locations in the country, with our consultants experiencing first-hand the local NZFS values so widely respected in New Zealand’s communities.