Sydney Fish Market

Client

Sydney Fish Market
Industry

Food
State

NSW

As the largest seafood market in the Southern Hemisphere, Sydney Fish Market (SFM) is a vital hub for Australia’s seafood industry, with wholesalers, retailers, restaurants, and buyers relying on their trading platforms and operational systems to conduct business every day.

The organisation now welcomes an estimated six million visitors each year, making them one of Sydney’s most visited tourist destinations. In January 2026 SFM undertook one of the most significant milestones in their history: relocating to a new, purpose-built facility on Sydney Harbour. The move required not only a physical transition, but also a complete transformation of the organisation’s technology environment, led by Glenn Casarotto, who joined Sydney Fish Market as Head of IT in March 2025.

“When I came on board I was tasked with bringing the team up to the next level, building this whole environment, and migrating a lot of legacy systems that we had at the old location — in almost a record period of time — to get us ready for the new site”, Casarotto says.

Many of the systems supporting the existing market were running on legacy infrastructure that could not easily support the operational demands of the new facility. With a tight timeline and the move already highly publicised, SFM needed to modernise their infrastructure, migrate key workloads, and establish a secure and scalable technology platform — and they needed to do so quickly.

From the outset, Casarotto had a vision to transform SFM into a cloud-first organisation. Recognising the complexity of the task, Casarotto engaged specialist Microsoft Partner, Quorum as a strategic partner to help deliver the transformation. “In the early days I realised that we really needed a partner in here”, he says. “We needed someone who has already done this, that could hit the ground running — that really was able to understand a very unique Australian business in a very short period of time”.

Challenges

Sydney Fish Market’s relocation came with both technical and organisational challenges. In particular, SFM’s IT team was tasked with migrating critical systems from the legacy environment at the old site while at the same time building out the infrastructure that would be needed to launch operations at the new facility. Compounding this challenge was the issue that much of SFM’s infrastructure had been built up over many years, accumulating technical debt, ageing hardware, and legacy applications.

To begin, Quorum led the engagement with a comprehensive technical assessment of SFM’s existing environment in order to identify specific risks and opportunities for modernisation. The result of this audit process was a detailed roadmap, which guided the transformation program through a series of initial projects and phased initiatives that included the following stages:

Infrastructure Remediation

Addressing critical infrastructure and configuration issues
Improving identity and access management controls
Stabilising legacy systems prior to migration

Cloud Migration & Modern Platform Architecture

Migrating legacy infrastructure and workloads into Microsoft Azure
Establishing secure Azure landing zones with governance and networking controls
Deploying infrastructure-as-code for scalable cloud provisioning

Security Modernisation & Platform Optimisation

Modernising the Microsoft 365 environment
Implementing Microsoft Defender for Endpoint across servers and workstations
Deploying Microsoft Sentinel for centralised monitoring and threat detection
Launching Microsoft Defender for Identity to detect, investigate, and respond to identity-based attacks across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments
Implementing Microsoft Intune and Autopilot to support automated device provisioning
Establishing Conditional Access policies to strengthen identity security
Deploying Mail Security improvements to protect users and their data
Introducing Azure Virtual Desktop to replace outdated remote desktop systems and improve remote access for users and 3^rd party contractors

Following the completion of this initial transformation and migration work, Quorum implemented the Cyber One – Threat Shield to replace a legacy SOC/SIEM solution. Threat Shield is a managed detection and response capability built on Microsoft’s security platform that continuously monitors SFM’s entire digital estate for potential threats. Through centralised visibility into security alerts and access to Quorum’s security specialists, Cyber One strengthens SFM’s ongoing cyber resilience while freeing up internal IT resources to focus on other organisational priorities.

Additionally, SFM engaged Quorum’s Managed Services capability to assist in stabilising the existing environment and also to support the environment post-transition. Initially, this workstream included the provision of managed platform and managed technology services across SFM’s cloud and end-user environments. Now, these services provide SFM with access to dedicated technical resources, proactive monitoring, and day-to-day operational support on an ongoing basis to maintain system performance, manage incidents, requests and continuously optimise the environment.

SFM’s transformation also extended beyond Quorum’s core project work, managed services, and cyber services. Through the Cloud Collective — an alliance of four leading specialist Microsoft partners — Quorum brought in IComm to modernise SFM’s telephony and audio-visual infrastructure. Through this work, IComm migrated SFM’s legacy PBX systems to Microsoft Teams telephony, in addition to implementing a modern meeting room technology strategy for the new facility.

Beyond technical work, Quorum supported SFM in navigating the cultural changes associated with modernising IT environments and partnering in-house team members with external resources. “Some team members have been here for decades”, Casarotto says. “Part of my role was to help the team understand that things were changing”.

Demonstrable Success

The transformation’s ultimate test came on 19 January 2026, when Sydney Fish Market officially opened their new facility.

The move was a high-profile event attended by government officials and widely covered by national media. Behind the scenes, the entire technology platform had been successfully migrated and was operational in time for opening day.

“The first thing I have to attribute to Quorum’s work is that we’re actually operational in this building”, Casarotto says. “They made a lot happen in a very brief period of time to enable a whole movement to the cloud to allow us to come here”.

With their infrastructure now operating securely in the cloud and their systems modernised, Sydney Fish Market has established a technology platform capable of supporting future growth and innovation.

For Casarotto, the partnership with Quorum has been defined by expertise, collaboration, and trust. “From day dot when I met Mark [McLean], Quorum’s Managing Director, I felt very comfortable”, he says. “It really wasn’t a sales pitch. It was more a technical capability; an understanding of what Quorum have done, what Quorum can do, and importantly how it can marry to what Sydney Fish Market required”.

Looking back on the transformation, McLean credits the success of the program to strong leadership and a shared commitment to delivery. “Glenn’s leadership and clarity of vision were instrumental in the success of this program”, he says. “Our team loved working with Sydney Fish Market to bring that vision to life and to deliver a platform that was ready for day one. Being part of such a historic initiative is exactly the kind of work Quorum is proud to stand behind and was something our team genuinely loved delivering.”

Today, Sydney Fish Market continues to partner with Quorum through the delivery of various technical managed services, ensuring their systems remain secure, scalable, and well positioned to support the organisation’s next chapter

Results

As a result of the transformation, Sydney Fish Market now operate on a modern, cloud-first technology platform designed to support the organisation’s long-term growth.

The migration to Azure removed the operational constraints of the previous on-premises environment and introduced a scalable, resilient architecture capable of supporting the market’s daily trading operations.
The organisation’s security has also improved significantly through the Cyber One – Threat Shield program, which provides SFM with real-time threat monitoring and enhanced protections across devices and systems.
Ongoing managed services delivered by Quorum provide SFM with continuous monitoring, support, and optimisation across their cloud and end-user environments, enabling SFM’s internal IT team to focus on strategic initiatives while ensuring day-to-day operations remain stable and secure.
Consolidating on the Microsoft cloud has enabled SFM to apply consistent, platformwide security controls across infrastructure, identities, devices, and workloads.
SFM staff and partners now benefit from a more streamlined technology experience, which includes faster device provisioning capabilities, secure remote access, and the implementation of modern collaboration tools across the new facility.

A key driver of these successful results was the day-to-day collaboration between SFM’s IT leadership and Quorum’s engineering teams. “The ease of accessing an engineer, the ease of having a discussion, the simplicity of meetings — the whole collaboration piece in my opinion has been very seamless and very well thought out”, Casarotto says.

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