Published: Aug 30, 2024
Compass Group: Timely Managed Services support after BSOD for Australian food and support services business
Compass Group (Compass) is one of Australia’s largest food and support services companies, with over 13,000 employees providing 52 million meals each year. Compass has been servicing clients in Australia for more than forty years, across industries including energy, resources, healthcare and education, as well as in the government sector, including defence.
NCS Australia was engaged by Compass to help migrate its data platform from IBM to Amazon Web Services (AWS) in early 2023. Following the successful completion of this project, Compass selected NCS Australia as a Managed Services partner in 2024.
NCS Australia’s Managed Services team are responsible for providing crucial support for Compass’ cloud and data management platforms. The team ensure its multi-cloud technology stack, including a large AWS EC2 and S3 storage footprint, is managed effectively. The scope of capabilities NCS Australia provides to Compass as a Managed Services client includes:
- 24x7 support and service-level agreements covering Cloud, Data and Application technology stack
- Skilled resources and IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) based service management
- Governance, risk and compliance services
- Ongoing maintenance and support of the on-premise and cloud environment
- Data resiliency, backup and disaster recovery
- Cost management
- Application and database management
- Network, security, identify and access management
- AWS service integration and service operations
The challenge
An IT failure wreaked havoc globally in mid July 2024, with a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) incident – described as the ‘largest outage in history’ – leading to major disruptions for many millions worldwide, with customers left unable to complete various day-to-day transactions such as checking in for flights. About 8.5 million Windows systems crashed due to an automated update to a widely used security product. This outage impacted airlines, banks, media organisations, supermarkets, hospitals and other businesses internationally, and was widely felt in Australia by businesses and their customers.
The initial outage put Windows machines in reboot loops before eventually displaying a ‘blue screen of death’. Afterwards, businesses were given remediation advice and technical recommendations to implement. This included instructions to help them recover, with the Australian Signals Directorate’s Australian Cyber Security Centre encouraging organisations to “continue to apply updates and patching to software and security products”.
Compass, as one of Australia’s largest food and support services companies, was impacted by this BSOD incident, with a large portion of its critical systems’ performance impacted. The business had reduced operations during the BSOD incident, with access to its core data platform affected.
Ensuring optimised availability with IT systems is vital for Compass so its team can deliver food and support services for clients. Compass has market-leading capabilities, for example, in support services such as cleaning, housekeeping, reception, and security in the healthcare sector, with residents and patients in hospitals and senior living facilities relying on Compass to be well nourished, cared for, and to feel safe in these facilities.
The response
NCS Australia’s Managed Services team were proactive in how the team supported Compass, in addition to other clients, ensuring timely assistance was provided during the BSOD incident and afterwards. The Managed Services team collaborated with Compass’s internal IT department to remediate key functions, manually restarting core services and applying respective patching and remediations as soon as these became available.
The team were highly responsive – with visibility of Compass’ systems ensuring a fast response was possible, when and how it was needed. A high-quality governance framework provided by NCS Australia as part of the existing client relationship was also crucial, ensuring the right protocols could be followed. Disaster recovery and resiliency preparedness is included in NCS Australia’s enterprise-level Managed Services offering. As an existing client, Compass was able to access effective support in responding to this incident and minimise impact on its operations.
“This is an example of the value we bring to our Managed Services customers and the customer orientation that NCS Australia proves time and time again. We are delighted to have been able to help Compass Group through this significant incident.”
Geoff Hunter, Managed Services Lead, NCS Australia
The impact
The BSOD incident began about 3pm AEST on Friday 19 July. With support from NCS Australia’s Managed Services team, Compass was able to remediate its critical IT systems by around 9am AEST on Saturday 20 July, allowing its team to continue providing food and support services nationally across the diverse industries it operates in.
Compass provides vital workplace support for communities every day in accommodation centres with thousands of workers requiring warm meals, clean beds, quality recreation and laundered work wear – such as in the oil, gas, mining, construction and defence sectors. It’s stadia and event brands leverage teams that deliver hospitality experiences at some of the world’s biggest and most iconic venues culturally. These are just some of the industries in which the business’ core services could have been much more adversely impacted, had the team not had the support of a reliable, agile Managed Services provider.
Losses and business costs from BSOD incidents can include data losses, productivity declines, hardware damage, security vulnerabilities, system instabilities and legal repercussions. With an existing relationship with NCS Australia as a reliable Managed Services partner, Compass was able to minimise potential productivity and efficiency losses due to this major global IT outage and its aftershocks.
