Shoalhaven City Council boosts disaster recovery with Azure

Logicalis Australia has assisted Shoalhaven City Council in reviewing and enhancing their disaster recovery procedures by migrating key services to Microsoft Azure.

Shoalhaven City Council serves over 50 towns and villages in New South Wales, Australia, and has a population exceeding 108,500 people. The council has faced several natural disasters in recent years, prompting the need for a review of their disaster recovery protocols and alternatives for hosting applications and corporate data.

The council's previous disaster recovery site, located a few kilometres from its main chambers, was deemed inadequate. This site also held several production workloads on aging servers that were out of warranty.

While most of the council's applications were already SaaS-based, critical applications, including a document management system and a Geographic Information System (GIS), were still managed on-site. Shoalhaven City Council valued the GIS data for its utility during natural disasters; therefore, a more secure solution was needed.

Shoalhaven City Council engaged Logicalis Australia to design a solution centred on cloud migration to Azure, leveraging their experience in local government and infrastructure expertise.

Dane Hamilton, Shoalhaven City Council's Chief Information Officer, commented, "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."

He further stated, "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 implementing the cloud-ready framework suggested by Logicalis Australia, Shoalhaven City Council undertook significant upgrades to their internet connectivity and network infrastructure to support a hybrid cloud environment.

Working with Microsoft Azure marked a new venture for the council's IT team. They quickly adapted with assistance from Logicalis to integrate their systems and networks into the Production Ready Cloud Platform landing zone.

During the migration, Shoalhaven City Council transitioned more than 45 Virtual Machines to Azure, receiving positive feedback from its staff.

Feedback noted enhanced application performance in the Azure environment, with notable speed improvements in the records management system and SQL databases.

Several key benefits have emerged from the project. By relocating document and GIS systems to Azure, the council has mitigated risks by geographically separating these systems, reducing their vulnerability to disasters.

The new cloud environment contributes to increased security and resiliency by tracking all changes and implementing advanced firewalls and security protocols to mitigate cyber threats.

With Azure, Shoalhaven City Council benefits from continuous improvement, accessing new services and maintaining a flexible and agile solution framework.

The cloud migration also resulted in a centralised IT environment, providing clearer service visibility and shifting costs from capital expenditure to operational expense.

High availability improvements have already been noted, with fewer unplanned downtime events since the transition to Azure.

The project also enhances automation in platform and application management, improving self-service capabilities across the council's IT environments.