How AMVIA Modernised IT Across Proactive Personnel's 30+ Branch Network

What was the challenge for Proactive Personnel?

Proactive Personnel is one of the UK's established national recruitment agencies, with a branch network spanning more than 30 locations. The business had grown organically, and its IT reflected that: mixed hardware generations, inconsistent software, a blend of cloud and on-premises systems, and no central IT management.

The day-to-day consequences were real. Staff experiences varied branch to branch — newer laptops and fast lines in some, ageing kit and slow broadband in others. Support was reactive: issues were logged and eventually fixed, but nothing watched for problems before they hit staff. Costs were hard to forecast across per-incident fees, break-fix hardware, and ad-hoc software buys.

Security was the bigger worry. With no centralised device management, posture varied across the estate:

• MFA was not enforced across Microsoft 365 access.
• Patch compliance was inconsistent between branches.
• There was no single view of whether every device had working security software.
• Legacy authentication was left enabled "just for that one app" — despite being the vector for the overwhelming majority of password spray attacks.

That last point matters. Legacy authentication protocols — IMAP, POP3, SMTP, Exchange ActiveSync, MAPI — do not support MFA and remain a frequent attack vector. Microsoft reports that more than 99% of password spray attacks use legacy authentication, which is why blocking it is a foundational hardening step (Microsoft Learn). For context on scale, 68% of IT leaders in a CoreView industry survey reported attackers attempting to reach their Microsoft 365 environment weekly, daily, or constantly.

What did AMVIA do?

AMVIA proposed a phased IT modernisation across three stages, so improvements were visible to the management team throughout — not just at the end. Each phase delivered a measurable outcome before the next began, which kept risk low across a live 30-branch estate.

The programme broke down as:

• Phase 1 — managed service foundation. RMM agents across all devices, managed antivirus replaced with Microsoft Defender for Business, and centralised patch management. This is the core of AMVIA's managed IT support.
• Phase 2 — connectivity. The most problematic branch circuits were replaced with better-performing lines, with managed routers added for centralised network visibility. Where a slow line was the main productivity constraint, AMVIA arranged business broadband upgrades.
• Phase 3 — Microsoft 365 migration. A full move from on-premises email and file storage to Microsoft 365 Business Premium, with SharePoint replacing on-premises file servers. AMVIA ran this as a managed Microsoft 365 migration, branch by branch.

The migration was conducted branch-by-branch, with mailbox moves scheduled outside business hours and SharePoint document libraries migrated over weekends. A 30-day parallel-run period at each branch let staff settle into the new environment before legacy systems were decommissioned.

Which technologies did AMVIA deploy?

The stack deployed across the Proactive Personnel estate was deliberately Microsoft-first and security-first — a single accountable provider rather than a tangle of point vendors. Everything below was standardised and centrally managed, so every branch ran the same hardened baseline.

This is the practical shape of AMVIA's Microsoft 365 security approach: managed by Microsoft-certified engineers, configured to a security baseline, and monitored centrally. The National Cyber Security Centre lists multi-factor authentication as one of the highest-impact controls a business can turn on (NCSC guidance).

What were the results?

The impact was measurable within weeks of the managed service going live. Proactive patch management and standardised security configurations cut the estate's risk exposure, and AmviaIQ's central visibility meant AMVIA could find and fix issues before staff reported them. Reactive helpdesk tickets fell by approximately 40% within the first six months.

Moving to Microsoft 365 removed the maintenance overhead of on-premises servers and simplified the environment. Branch managers could reach files and email from any device, supporting both in-branch and remote working, and Teams cut reliance on phone calls for cross-branch coordination. Remaining helpdesk issues were simpler to resolve because AMVIA had full remote access and context for every device.

IT environment — before & after AMVIA

*Source: AMVIA managed-service reporting for Proactive Personnel.*

Why managed IT and Microsoft 365 together?

For a multi-branch business, the security win comes from standardisation: one baseline, one identity model, one provider accountable for both the IT and the security around it. Splitting connectivity, devices, and Microsoft 365 across separate suppliers is what created Proactive Personnel's inconsistency in the first place.

Bringing it under one fully managed IT contract meant patching, endpoint security, identity, and migration were governed by the same policies — so every branch got the same protection without local exceptions.