How Tanglin designed, secured and scaled the IT infrastructure behind a fast-growing New Zealand engineering and surveying firm – through three office moves and a tenfold increase in staff.
The client is a New Zealand-based engineering and surveying firm whose work depends on demanding, data-intensive software, and increasingly on large volumes of drone-captured aerial survey data. Precision work leaves no room for downtime or lost data. This case study has been anonymised.
When Tanglin first began managing their IT, the firm was a brand-new company with just two staff. Today it employs around fifty people. Across that entire journey – and three changes of premises – Tanglin has been their sole IT partner, providing strategic advice, IT governance and day-to-day management.
A two-person start-up and a fifty-person engineering practice need very different IT. The challenge wasn't a single project – it was sustaining secure, reliable, high-performance IT through years of continuous change, without ever over-spending on infrastructure the business didn't yet need.
The firm's work created specific demands. Engineering and surveying applications are resource-hungry and intolerant of interruption. Aerial survey drones generate enormous and ever-growing volumes of data that had to be stored safely and kept separate from core production systems. Three office relocations each meant moving, re-cabling and re-establishing a complete business network with minimal disruption. And as the firm grew more reliant on its data, the cost of downtime or a security breach grew with it.
The firm needed a partner who could build infrastructure that was secure, robust and protected against disaster – and who would right-size it at every stage rather than selling more than the business required.
Tanglin designed and managed every layer of the firm's IT, expanding it deliberately as the business grew.
A pair of Dell production servers run in failover, so if one fails the other carries the virtual servers automatically with no interruption. They connect to a high-capacity SAN that grew with demand – from around 12 TB to 34 TB – running the firm's file services, domain, terminal server and engineering applications.
Using Veeam, every virtual server is backed up daily and replicated to a separate datacentre – exact standby copies of the firm's systems. If the main office were lost entirely, operations could be recovered from the replicated infrastructure.
SentinelOne AI-powered endpoint protection was deployed across every PC and server in 2019, backed by FortiGate firewalls at both sites, a permanent encrypted VPN between them, and unified threat management – with a spare firewall held ready by Tanglin for rapid failover.
An onsite Data Domain repository compresses and deduplicates backups so effectively that hundreds of terabytes of backup history are held on a fraction of the disk. Retention runs from daily copies through to permanent monthly archives kept for up to seven years.
Rather than burden production systems, drone survey data lives on a dedicated Synology NAS (RAID-protected with a hot spare) and is backed up to encrypted offsite cloud storage – scaling cleanly as that data grew past 10 TB.
Microsoft 365 was rolled out to all staff for email and Office apps, moving email to the cloud and simplifying licensing. Tanglin continually retired on-premise components – like the old mail and spam servers – as better cloud options matured.
Staff supported as the firm scaled, without IT ever holding growth back
Office relocations delivered with minimal disruption to the business
Backup data compression, storing hundreds of TB on a fraction of the disk
SentinelOne AI protection on every PC and server, actively monitored
Backups and offsite replication of every server, proactively monitored
Backup retention, with permanent weekly and monthly archives
What sets the relationship apart is restraint. As the firm's needs changed, Tanglin matched the infrastructure to them rather than defaulting to the biggest option. When premium storage replacements were priced up, Tanglin flagged them plainly as over-engineered for the firm's actual needs.
More recently, with staff numbers settling, Tanglin proposed moving disaster recovery to a cloud-based data-protection service – avoiding the cost of replacing ageing datacentre equipment, the datacentre hosting fees and the dedicated network link, while keeping seven-year retention and adding Microsoft 365 backup from the same console. Honest, cost-conscious advice that puts the client's interests first is the reason the relationship has lasted more than a decade.
Resilience has been proven in practice, too. When a building power surge destroyed the firm's UPS in 2021, a replacement was sourced and installed within hours – a measure of how closely Tanglin manages the environment and its vendors.
“Tanglin has been our IT partner since we were two people. They've grown our systems with us every step of the way – secure, reliable and always right-sized for where the business actually is. We simply don't worry about our IT.”
John Gardiner — Director of a New Zealand engineering & surveying firm
Whether you're two people or fifty, Tanglin builds IT that's secure, resilient and sized to fit – and grows with you. Let's talk about where your business is headed.
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