About | Online IT

About the founder

Built by engineers. Still led by engineers. Established 2008.

Online IT was founded in 2008 by John Kekatos and remains Australian-owned and founder-led today.

What started as a hands-on engineering business has grown into a senior managed IT, cybersecurity and cloud partner for Australian organisations that need reliable systems, practical advice and clear accountability.

The business is still run with the same engineering discipline it was built on: understand the environment, document the decisions, own the outcome and stay accountable to the client.

Australian-owned, founder-led, and accountable to the businesses Online IT supports.

John Kekatos

Founder, Online IT

Why bigger businesses choose us

What you get from a senior team that actually owns the work

Our clients choose us when they need senior engineering, clear ownership and a partner that can manage the full environment rather than just respond to tickets.

Senior engineers on the work

Our model is senior-led by default. Clients deal with engineers who know the environment, understand the business impact and have the authority to resolve issues properly.

Architecture before deployment

Every environment we manage is brought into a documented target state. Architecture, documentation, decision records and handover standards matter. Clients should never be left with a black box, by us or by anyone after us.

Real accountability

Same standard, same accountability, and direct access to the people responsible for the outcome. We keep the commercial relationship close to the technical reality, so clients can speak with someone who understands the environment and can make a decision.

What we believe

The standards we work to

Senior-led support.

You deal with people who understand your environment and have the authority to make decisions.

No lock-in.

Your tenancy, your data, your documentation. We work to a standard you could hand to anyone, including not us. We're not interested in being someone you can't leave.

Plain English.

If we can't explain it without acronyms, we don't understand it well enough ourselves. Reports your board can read. Recommendations that come with a 'why', not a brochure.

Honest scoping.

We tell you when you don't need to spend money. The advice doesn't change based on the margin we'd make on the gear. If something can wait six months, we'll say so.

What we can actually deliver

Engineering depth behind the managed service

Plenty of MSPs run a help desk. We design and operate the platforms underneath. These are the capabilities our team holds in-house.

Multi-tenant Azure

Subscription design, landing zones, cost guardrails and policy. Built for businesses outgrowing single-subscription Azure.

Hybrid and private cloud

VMware, Hyper-V, Azure and on-premise stitched together properly. For workloads where public cloud is not the right answer.

Microsoft 365 enterprise

Tenant design, Exchange Online, SharePoint information architecture, Teams, Intune, Defender. Configured to standards, not defaults.

Identity and SSO

Entra ID, conditional access, MFA, SSO into line-of-business apps. The control plane your auditors want documented.

SIEM and security operations

Managed detection and response, log aggregation, alert triage and incident response runbooks. Eyes on, after hours.

Network architecture

Campus LAN, branch SD-WAN, Wi-Fi design and firewall policy. Designed for the way your business actually moves data.

Essential 8 maturity uplift

ACSC Essential 8 baseline assessment, gap remediation and ongoing maturity reporting. Real maturity, not just a self-assessment tick.

Migrations and cutovers

Tenant migrations, server retirements, office relocations and cloud cutovers. Phased, runbook-driven, rollback-ready.

The kind of work we do

A snapshot of who we look after

Representative examples, based on common environments we support. Names and identifying details are omitted for confidentiality.

Mid-size litigation firm

30-partner firm. Hardened Microsoft 365 tenant, Essential 8 uplift and immutable backup behind document management. The firm entered renewal with stronger evidence for its cyber insurance submission.

Multi-site allied health group

12 sites, 200 clinicians. Hardened Microsoft 365, Intune-managed devices, immutable patient-record backup and a documented notifiable-breach playbook. The organisation had a clearer security baseline within six months.

Mid-tier commercial builder

80 staff across head office, project offices and active sites. Standardised site Wi-Fi with 4G failover, Intune-managed devices and SharePoint-based drawing and RFI control. Mobilisation became more repeatable across projects.

Boutique strategy consultancy

60 consultants serving ASX-listed clients. Information barriers, conditional access and DLP applied to the main channels where client data was stored, shared and sent. Corporate-client security reviews became easier to evidence.

Multi-partner accounting practice

50 staff, 1,800 SME clients. Migrated off ageing on-premise servers and a tired RDS environment. The first tax season on the new platform ran without the major RDS and file-server issues the practice had previously experienced.

National community services charity

350 staff and volunteers, eight regional offices. Moved onto eligible Microsoft 365 not-for-profit licensing, deployed Intune across the fleet and placed donor data behind clearer access controls. Annual licensing spend was reduced.

How clients find us

Mostly by word of mouth, the old-fashioned way

Most new Online IT clients come through referral, reputation or prior working relationships. A board member moves to a new organisation. A finance lead recommends us after seeing the difference. An IT manager inherits an environment we built and asks us to keep supporting it.

That referral pattern matters because it reflects the way we work: practical advice, senior technical ownership and long-term accountability.

If you've been referred by someone we look after, mention them when you get in touch. We'll know who to thank.

2008

the year Online IT was founded

the age the founder was when he started it

18+

years still under the same name and same hands

1 team

across the whole country, top to bottom

Platforms we work with