Most businesses start with clearly laid-out plans. Impact ICT took a more unorthodox path, starting with a car, driving to a handful of client meetings, and sharing a strong belief that community organizations deserved better technology support.
Founded in Western Australia in 2021, Impact ICT serves not-for-profits and community-based institutions, including aged care providers and disability services. From the start, the managed service provider (MSP) wanted to do more than fix day-to-day IT issues. They wanted to help clients build environments that were scalable, manageable, and secure, taking more of the tech burden off their clients so they could focus on the people they serve.
That belief shaped the business early. Impact ICT chose not to sell security in tiers or treat it like an add-on. “We only do one managed service product, which includes security,” says Tom, Director and Solutions Specialist at Impact ICT. Built to meet Australia’s Essential 8 Maturity Level 1, Impact ICT’s baseline makes strong security part of the standard from day one. But holding that line comes with pressure.
Impact ICT supports hundreds of endpoints while also carrying the daily demands of managed services. And while they’ve grown quickly, they’re still a lean team of specialists. Tom puts it plainly, saying, “We don’t have someone who sits there doing security all day, every day.”
That’s why Impact ICT needed a way to deliver serious protection without pretending a growing MSP could operate like a full-time security shop. They also needed vendors who’d act like real partners when something went wrong.
Tom had little patience for the finger-pointing that often takes place with IT vendors. Huntress stood out because the relationship felt different. “When there’s a problem, Huntress isn’t saying, ‘Oh, that’s not our fault,’” he says. “It’s more like, ‘Let’s jump on a call and figure out what went wrong.’”
In 2022, Impact ICT rolled out the Huntress Security Platform across their client base. Today, that includes Huntress Managed Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) and Managed Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) across 43 managed clients, nearly 1,000 endpoints, and a much larger set of Microsoft 365 identities. Many of those users are frontline workers in community care settings, making identity protection especially important.
For Impact ICT, Huntress became critical backup. When Huntress verifies an incident, Tom’s team gets a phone call, a text, and a ticket. And when something looks off but falls outside the team’s confidence level, they can bring it to the Huntress Security Operations Center (SOC)—a 24/7 team of elite threat analysts backed by AI—for review.
“The Huntress SOC is a time saver,” says Tom. “We also gain peace of mind knowing we’ve got somebody who’s there for us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.”
That support is vital because Impact ICT still wants to own the client relationship. Huntress gives them extra coverage while letting them remain the steady hand their clients rely on.
After onboarding a new aged care client, Impact ICT deployed Huntress across nearly 100 computers. Within 48 hours, Huntress found a critical issue on one machine that appeared to be exfiltrating data. The file was tied to an old CEO’s user profile and had reportedly been there since 2019.
Huntress promptly isolated the machine, and Impact ICT followed their incident response process and worked with the Huntress SOC to contain the threat. Tom sums it up simply: “Huntress was the game changer.”
Beyond that incident, Tom says Managed ITDR regularly helps surface suspicious inbox rules, malicious applications in Microsoft 365, unusual sign-ins, and “impossible travel” events. In some cases, users don’t even realize they’ve done anything risky before their accounts are isolated. That speed has helped keep small issues from becoming much bigger ones.
Huntress changed the daily load on the Impact ICT team. Before, Tom’s team had to handle most of the alerts, which pulled staff into work they weren’t always equipped to do deeply and took time away from the rest of the business.
Tom says one of the problems with a previous cybersecurity vendor was that his team was left “doing all the analysis, checking, and verifying, whereas now, Huntress does all that for us.”
That support helps Impact ICT stay accountable without stretching beyond their limits. They can move faster, ask better questions, and lean on the Huntress SOC when something goes beyond their skill set.
Impact ICT wanted security built into their standard service. Huntress makes that possible by combining strong protection with 24/7 SOC support in a way that keeps top-tier security within reach for the community organizations they serve.
Huntress also made the back-office side easier. Impact ICT uses the PSA integration to keep license counts accurate across products, which helps them bill recurring services correctly without as much manual work.
Impact ICT built their business around a simple belief that security should be part of the standard, and that standard should always be high. Huntress helps them hold that line as they grow.
For Tom, the value of Huntress comes from knowing that when something serious happens, his team isn’t handling it alone. “We’re all trying to do the same thing,” he says. “We’re all trying to make the client more secure.” Because when those clients serve vulnerable people and local communities, security extends far beyond a network.
