Melbourne,โฏ Australiaโฏโ 19 November 2024: Logicalis Australia, a leading global technology services provider, has assisted Shoalhaven City Council in reviewing their disaster recovery procedures and protecting applications and corporate data by migrating servers to Microsoft Azure.
Shoalhaven City Council is a large regional council overseeing 50 towns and villages on the South Coast of NSW. With a population of more than 108,500 people, Shoalhaven is known for its pristine beaches, striking coastal plains and surrounding mountains. In recent years, the Shoalhaven region has experienced numerous natural disasters, from bushfires to flooding and severe weather events. These experiences led the Council to review its disaster recovery procedures and consider hosting options for its applications and corporate data.
The existing disaster recovery site was located just a few kilometres away from the main Council chambers in a facility considered not fit for purpose. Aside from disaster recovery, the facility also housed several production workloads across a fleet of ageing servers, which were out of warranty and reaching their limits.
The Shoalhaven City Council already had most of its applications as SaaS-based services. However, critical applications were still housed onsite, including its document management system and a Geographic information System (GIS) for spatial data. GIS data is also valuable during a natural disaster, adding to the need for a safer and more secure solution.
Based on its excellent reputation, experiences with local government and infrastructure expertise, Shoalhaven City Council turned to Logicalis Australia to outline a solution for Azure migration.
The Logicalis Australia team began with an initial consulting period for Shoalhaven City Council to assess their environments and existing infrastructure properly. The in-depth analysis mapped out the possible approaches and allowed for a more complete costing of the recommended solution. The cost estimates considered several factors, including licencing, real estate, additional funding, and ongoing monthly costs based on current usage.
According to Dane Hamilton, CIO at Shoalhaven City Council, “Logicalis was able to bring their deep knowledge and experience in the space to present a well-packaged concept. They had a template and a solution design with aspects that had already been implemented elsewhere. We were confident they could deliver the solution and that they didn’t miss any aspects in its design.”
“Because the Logicalis team works with several other local government organisations, they understood our challenges and who we were as an organisation. They didn’t limit their thinking or try to sell us on a single-vendor solution. They deeply understood our industry, which showed in their response.”
Before moving to the cloud-ready framework recommended by Logicalis, Shoalhaven City Council first needed to upgrade their network and infrastructure. This involved improving internet connectivity and redesigning the network and firewalls for a hybrid cloud setup.
Working in an Azure environment was a new experience for the Council’s IT team, and they ย upskilled quickly and received guidance from Logicalis on how to integrate their systems and networks into their Production Ready Cloud Platform landing zone.
Shoalhaven City Council moved more than 45 Virtual Machines to Azure during the migration, with staff giving positive feedback during the transition.
Recent feedback from Council employees have reported applications perform better in the Azure environment and highlighted increases to speed, particularly with the records management system and SQL databases.
The project has delivered several key benefits:
- Risk mitigation โ By shifting its document management and GIS systems to Azure, Shoalhaven City Council has helped to ensure these systems are geographically separated and thereby reducing the risk of being impacted by a disaster.
- Greater security & resiliency โ Shoalhaven City Council’s new cloud environment keeps track of all changes. It leverages the latest firewalls and security features to reduce the likelihood and impact of cyber-attacks and internal misconfiguration.
- Continuous improvement โ With hundreds of new services released each year, Shoalhaven City Council can now gain access to continual innovation and maintain the agility of their new solution.
- Centralisation & visibility โ The new well-governed cloud environment helped to decentralise its IT environment, providing clearer visibility of services used treating costs as an operating expense rather than sporadic capital outlays to renew server infrastructure.
- High availability โ Shoalhaven City Council has already experienced a reduction in unplanned downtime instances since moving to Azure.
- Improved automation – Platform and application automation enables better management across IT environments and improved self-service capabilities.
—END
About Logicalis
We are Architects of Changeโข. We help organisations succeed in a digital-first world. At Logicalis, we harness our collective technology expertise to help our clients build a blueprint for success, so they can deliver sustainable outcomes that matter.
Our lifecycle services across cloud, connectivity, collaboration and security are designed to help optimise operations, reduce risk and empower employees.
As a global technology service provider, we deliver next-generation digital managed services, to provide our clients with real-time visibility and actionable insights across the performance of their digital ecosystem including; reliability, user experience, security, economic performance, and sustainability.
Our 7000+ โArchitects of Changeโ are based in 30 territories around the globe, helping our 10,000+ clients across a range of industry sectors, create sustainable outcomes through technology.
Logicalis has annualised revenues of $1.8 billion, from operations in Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, and Africa. It is a division of Datatec Limited, listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, with revenues of over $5.5 billion.
