AKD secures the backbone of an essential industry with Microsoft Defender and Entra

AKD has long supplied the structural timber that underpins homes, communities and industries across Australia. With operations spanning Victoria, New South Wales, and Queensland and more than a thousand employees, the company continues to expand both its production footprint and its digital ambitions. As Eddy Chong, Group IT Manager at AKD explains, AKD is focused on becoming “a data‑driven business, able to drive strategic and operational decision‑making,” and strengthening security is an essential part of that evolution. 

As AKD modernized, its security environment grew increasingly fragmented. Over the years, new tools have been added, each addressing specific requirements but never forming a coherent whole. The small IT team was stretched, and the workload only grew with every additional system. 

Stephen Pefanis, Technology and Security Architect at AKD noticed a deeper structural gap emerging. While endpoint protection was strong, the business was increasingly operating in the cloud, and identity had become the new security perimeter. The company needed a simpler, more unified approach that reflected how they operated today and where they wanted to be tomorrow. 

The lack of round‑the‑clock coverage posed another challenge. For a company of AKD’s scale, continuous monitoring was essential, yet impossible to achieve internally. They needed a capable SOC partner and a platform that could consolidate risk, reduce noise, and give the team confidence that nothing was slipping through unseen.

Consolidating identity, cloud, endpoint, and data security 

The Microsoft security ecosystem offers the consolidation AKD desperately needs, bringing identity, cloud, endpoint and data security into one unified platform. It also aligns seamlessly with AKD’s existing Microsoft environment, built heavily on Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Azure. And critically, moving from Microsoft 365 ME3 to Microsoft 365 ME5 licensing has unlocked capabilities that provide immediate uplift and long‑term strategic value. 

Microsoft 365 E5 adds security measures such as Microsoft Defender products for endpoints, identity, and Office 365, in addition to Microsoft Entra ID P2, which is designed to proactively detect, investigate, and automatically remediate sophisticated threats. “We looked at our existing partners and determined that bringing everything into a single platform would be the best step forward,” Pefanis says. “That’s where the Microsoft ME5 stack came into play, because Defender covers that whole end-to-end piece for us.”

The impact of consolidation becomes visible almost immediately. “In the last three months, we've seen an uptake of about 10% in our Microsoft Secure Score, which is a good increase, and we’ve seen about a 15% reduction in our vulnerabilities,” Pefanis says. “It’s hard to maintain a product when you’re so far behind, and this helps us get ahead of those critical vulnerabilities.” The improvement demonstrates how quickly security maturity can rise when visibility, tooling, and telemetry are centralized.  

Partners have played a decisive role in AKD’s success. Azured, with deep expertise across the Microsoft cloud, guided the deployment and helped calibrate the platform to the company’s operational realities. eSentire provided the essential 24/7 SOC monitoring that Chong and his team had long needed but had never been able to resource internally. 

From reactive defense to proactive protection 

With the Microsoft stack and SOC capability fully operational, the shift inside the business has been unmistakable. Silos have disappeared, the constant firefighting has eased, and the IT team has moved from reacting to incidents to anticipating them. Pefanis captures the difference succinctly: “We’ve gone from being reactive to proactive, now we’re proactively stopping threats before they get to us.” 

One of the more surprising benefits comes from the move to ME5 licensing. Broad access to tools like Power BI, previously limited by cost and availability, suddenly opened the door to analytics at scale. A transformation that began as a security uplift became the catalyst for broader digital capability across the company, accelerating AKD’s shift toward the data‑driven future Chong had long envisioned. 

With their new, unified security posture in place, AKD is now looking ahead. They are beginning to explore data loss prevention, cloud app security, and more sophisticated governance models for generative AI. They are also preparing to reduce reliance on legacy systems and streamline operations even further. Concludes Chong, “Microsoft ME5 and Defender allow us to implement what we already have, while also supporting improvement and innovation into the future.”

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