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Challenge

DESAE Right Fit for Risk accreditation to maintain their government contracts and accreditation status.

When the Australian Government introduced stricter cybersecurity requirements for organisations handling sensitive data, ABS Institute faced a critical compliance deadline — they needed to achieve DESAE Right Fit for Risk accreditation to maintain their government contracts and accreditation status.
As an Epic IT managed IT support client of seven years, ABS Institute turned to their trusted technology partner to design and implement a comprehensive security uplift aligned to the Essential Eight framework.

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Solution

To ensure our partner complied with the new far reaching security measures, Epic IT recommended & deployed a host of solutions.

Epic IT designed a structured cybersecurity programme targeting all eight mitigation strategies required for Essential Eight compliance:

1. Application control — Deployed application whitelisting policies to prevent unauthorised software execution across all endpoints

2. Patch management — Implemented automated patching for operating systems and applications within the Essential Eight’s recommended timeframes

3. Microsoft Office macro hardening — Configured macro execution policies to block untrusted macros while maintaining business productivity

4. User application hardening — Locked down web browsers and office applications against common exploit vectors

5. MFA hardening — Rolled out phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication across all user accounts and administrative access

6. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint — Deployed EDR with 24/7 threat monitoring and automated response capabilities

7. Privilege management — Implemented privileged access controls with just-in-time admin access and role-based permissions

8. Daily backup verification — Configured and tested backup and recovery processes meeting the Essential Eight’s data resilience requirements

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Success

ABS Institute successfully achieved DESAE Right Fit for Risk accreditation

ABS Institute successfully achieved DESAE Right Fit for Risk accreditation, securing their government partnership status and demonstrating compliance leadership within the WA training sector. The Essential Eight implementation also strengthened their overall security posture against ransomware, phishing, and insider threats — providing ongoing protection well beyond the compliance requirement.

The seven-year managed IT relationship ensured that Epic IT had deep knowledge of ABS Institute’s environment, enabling a faster and less disruptive implementation than would be possible with a new provider.

"One of the most critical aspects of business operations in the modern environment is Cyber Security. To maintain business continuity, meet privacy principles and keep information secure it requires the support of professional IT Management solutions. In addition to this, our organisation could not meet the contractual and legislative requirements of our clients without engaging a specialist in this field like Epic IT. Their input, implementation and management of our IT infrastructure and systems ensured we were able to achieve the level of compliance and security required to successfully meet performance outcomes where we could gain new business and meet our client needs."

- Mark Van Lith, Managing Director – Business Services

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