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Logicalis Australia has migrated Shoalhaven City Council’s servers, including more than 45 virtual machines, to Microsoft Azure to protect applications and corporate data to be in line with its disaster recovery procedures.
The Council oversees 50 towns and villages on the South Coast of New South Wales that has experienced numerous natural disasters in the past, ranging 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. Its existing disaster recovery site was located just a few kilometres away from the main council chambers in a facility considered not fit for purpose.
Shoalhaven City Council turned to Logicalis Australia to outline a solution for Azure migration because of its previous experiences with other local councils.
The migration project began with the Logicalis Australia team initially consulting for Shoalhaven City Council to assess their environments and existing infrastructure properly. This 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.
Before moving to the cloud-ready framework recommended by Logicalis, the Council had to upgrade its network and infrastructure which involved improving internet connectivity and redesigning the network and firewalls for a hybrid cloud setup.
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.
Most of the Council’s applications were available via software-as-a-service solutions, although critical applications were still housed onsite such as its document management system and a geographic information system for spatial data.
Shoalhaven City Council CIO Dane Hamilton said the service provider was able to bring its “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,” he said. “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.”
Working in an Azure environment was a new experience for the Council’s IT team and it was upskilled quickly and received guidance.
Logicalis was also instrumental on how to integrate the Council’s systems and networks into their production ready cloud platform landing zone.
The Council’s migration to Azure comes months after Logicalis transitioned Western Sydney University to Microsoft Azure Public Cloud in August for agility, scalability and security of its critical workloads.