Roma · Maranoa · Surat Basin · QLD
Frontrow runs managed IT, Microsoft 365 and cyber security for Roma and the Maranoa — the contractors and services firms in the Surat Basin gas supply chains, the agents and transporters around Australia's largest cattle selling centre, and the accommodation, logistics and professional businesses behind both. Serviced remotely by senior, certified people from Brisbane, with on-site visits scheduled when the work needs them.
Why local knowledge matters
Roma runs on two industries — gas and cattle — and both keep going whether or not the office is reachable. Sale days at the yards, crews on well pads, operators auditing their suppliers: the provider that plans for those realities answers a different way to the one selling a capital-city template.
Frontrow runs IT for Roma and Maranoa businesses with senior engineers, cloud-first systems designed for distance, and the security posture the gas supply chain actually audits.
A provider that understands a gas-and-cattle town and plans for it, not one surprised by it.
Honest about the address
Frontrow's offices are in Brisbane, Mackay, Townsville and Adelaide — not Roma. Rather than pretend otherwise, Frontrow services Roma and the Maranoa remotely from the Brisbane team, and schedules on-site visits when a job genuinely needs hands on the ground.
Frontrow has been a Microsoft Partner since 2018, with Modern Work and AI specialisation and a 5× Microsoft MVP on the team. For monitoring, Microsoft 365, Essential Eight and Copilot work, that depth reaches a Maranoa business the same way it reaches a Brisbane one — the senior architect on the call, wherever the desk happens to be.
Roma has produced gas longer than anywhere in Australia — in April 1961 the Roma powerhouse became the first place in the country where natural gas fuelled electricity generation. Today Santos's GLNG joint venture operates around Roma, where its $750 million Roma East project brought around 480 wells online, and Senex Energy's Roma North development is expanding to double production. Frontrow runs IT for the contractors, engineering firms and services businesses in those supply chains — multi-site identity, remote-site connectivity and the supplier security posture gas operators expect.
Roma Saleyards is Australia's largest cattle selling centre — owned and operated by Maranoa Regional Council, it closed the 2025-26 financial year with 362,051 head sold and cattle sales valued at a record $554 million. Frontrow supports the agents, transporters, feed and ag-services businesses around that marketplace, with systems that work from the office, the yards and the road.
Roma is the hub of the Maranoa Region — home base for Maranoa Regional Council and the health, education and community services that anchor a district where agriculture is worth around $620 million a year. Frontrow supports the services firms and government-adjacent businesses around those institutions, with the security posture public-sector work expects.
Accommodation and camps, transport and logistics, engineering and maintenance crews, and the accounting and legal practices that serve them all — the whole town works off the same two industries, and its businesses carry payroll, contracts and client data worth protecting. Frontrow manages the Microsoft 365 estate, identity security and backups behind that work.
What managed IT covers
Endpoints, identities, cloud workloads and network — watched, triaged, resolved.
Patching, MFA, application control, admin privilege, backups, macro controls. Board-reportable.
Tenant health, licence governance, Teams, SharePoint, Exchange, Intune — managed as one surface.
Intune policies, app deployment, device lifecycle, zero-touch provisioning across every office.
M365 and infrastructure backups, tested restores, documented RTO/RPO that meets your auditor.
Your ISP, your printer company, your line-of-business app vendor. One call to us — we handle the rest.
Designed for the Maranoa
A national MSP can sell a generic plan and a local one can sell a local address. Frontrow brings senior Microsoft and cyber depth to the town where natural gas first fuelled electricity generation in Australia in 1961, where the council-owned saleyards sold 362,051 head last financial year, and where the Surat Basin's operators audit every supplier — a district where gas, cattle and distance all expect systems to hold up.
Frontrow has no Roma office. Day-to-day support, monitoring and the Microsoft depth run remotely from the Brisbane team — Roma is about 480 km west-north-west of Brisbane by road — with on-site visits scheduled when hands-on work genuinely needs them. The engagement model is the senior architect on the call, not a junior at a local desk.
Roma appears on nbn's published Business Fibre Zone list — unusual for a town its size, and it changes the cost and availability of enterprise-grade fibre for premises inside the zone. Frontrow scopes connectivity from the zone maps and the address, not from assumptions, and designs failover for the sites that sit outside it.
When the nearest capital is nearly 500 km away, IT that depends on someone driving out is IT that waits. Frontrow designs cloud-first — identity, files and phones in Microsoft 365, remote monitoring and remote fixes — so the distance shows up in the road atlas, not in the ticket queue.
Gas operators and their major contractors push security expectations down the chain — supplier questionnaires, insurance conditions, evidence over assurances. Frontrow aligns controls to the Essential Eight on the Microsoft 365 stack a business already pays for, and reports posture in terms a procurement team will accept.
Business continuity
Tuesday sales at the yards, crews rostered onto sites, invoices against contract milestones — the work that defines the Maranoa runs to timetables IT doesn't get to move. When the only server is in one office and that office loses power or connectivity, everything downstream of it stops too.
Frontrow designs continuity before it's needed: systems that keep working when a site can't be reached, and a written plan for what comes back first — not a scramble after the outage, nearly 500 km from the nearest capital.
If the office is unreachable, work shouldn't stop with it. Frontrow puts identity, files and phones in Microsoft 365 — not on a single server in a single building — so staff keep working from wherever they are.
Off-site, geographically separate backups with tested restores and documented RTO/RPO. A backup drive in the same building as the server is not a continuity plan.
UPS on the comms rack, 4G/5G failover on the router, and a documented plan for who calls whom and what comes back first — designed so a depot, practice or site office rides out an interruption instead of going dark with it.
Plan it with real numbers
Frontrow publishes the tools it uses in scoping conversations, free and without a sign-up wall — so a Roma business can put numbers around cost, security posture and end-of-support exposure before the first call.
Roma appears on nbn's published Business Fibre Zone list — unusual for a town its size — which changes the cost and availability of enterprise-grade fibre for premises inside the zone. Frontrow checks every address against the zone maps before quoting connectivity, and designs failover for the sites that sit outside it.
An office in town, crews at well pads and camps, agents at the yards on sale day — they don't all get the same link. Frontrow designs SharePoint, Teams and Intune for offline-then-sync usage and mixed connectivity, so the slowest site in the fleet isn't the one that breaks the model.
Co-managed option
Plenty of Maranoa operations already have someone who keeps the lights on. Frontrow co-manages — taking the out-of-hours, the Microsoft depth, the security and the specialist project work — and hands back the day-to-day that team wants to keep. Fully managed if there's no internal IT at all.
Fixed scope, fixed price, fixed SLA. Project work is scoped separately, never slipped in through support.
Monthly reports an executive team can read — Essential Eight posture, ticket trends, risk — not a ticket dump.
From a client
"Expert team, high service levels, competitive solutions — and real expertise with geographically distributed operations across Australia."
FAQ — Roma & the Maranoa
Explore
The national managed IT model Frontrow delivers into the Maranoa.
Essential Eight, delivered on the Microsoft 365 you already pay for.
Frontrow's managed IT for the Western Downs, east along the Warrego Highway.
Talk to Frontrow
No call centre and no discovery-call runaround. Send the form and a senior consultant replies the same business day — with an actual view on your situation, not a brochure.
No Roma shopfront — Frontrow services Roma and the Maranoa remotely from Brisbane, with on-site visits when the work calls for them, and the senior architects a phone call away.
