Te Tihi o Ruahine Whānau Ora Alliance plays a vital role in supporting whanau, hapu and iwi in the Manawatu Community. With the growth of their organisation, Te Tihi needed to break away from their ICT partnership, requiring a new, innovative and agile ICT provider to support their technology aspirations in order to achieve more autonomy, independence and allow for future flexibility and scalability. As a result, this included a shift from IaaS to SaaS with the decommissioning of legacy shared server environments, a move to their new Head Office location and migration to Azure 365 services at the peak of COVID-19, all during lockdown Alert Level 4.

To support Te Tihi’s ICT approach, Spark worked in partnership with Te Tihi, safely and efficiently through lockdown. Te Tihi is an essential service to the community, and Spark engineers worked tirelessly during the Level 4 lockdown period, overcoming remote location and connectivity challenges to firstly ensure the migration of their ICT services from shared-services to an independent cloud-based platform to ensure Te Tihi could continue to operate meeting the needs of whānau during this unprecedented time. During this time, SPARK provided ongoing remote and on-site support in line with their organisational needs and requirements.

As a result of the work done through lockdown, Spark and Te Tihi have formed a strong bond and respect for each others mahi, and look forward to a strong partnership together. Te Tihi o Ruahine Whānau Ora Alliance have confidence in Spark for their ICT services and believe that our shared commitment to understand and respect each others core values ensures that together this will support the growth and development of the whānau ora within our community.