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Cloud Migration with Relationships Australia SA

Problem definition

Relationships Australia SA (RASA) is a community-based, not-for-profit organisation with no religious affiliations that has over 60 years’ experience in providing services that assist people who are vulnerable or disadvantaged.
With funding form both Commonwealth and State governments focused on delivering outcomes to South Australians, RASA have a need to maintain a cost-effective, secure environment for their operations without a need for future large capital expenditure budgets.
With their current on-premise environment reaching end-of-life, and some opportunities identified to implement improved disaster recovery practices, RASA approached Comunet to perform an IT audit and develop a future state architecture that could be delivered to their cost and risk appetite.

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Proposed Solution & Architecture


Comunet proposed a multi-stage approach based on migrating to AWS.

With a critical date in mind to ensure they were not running on end-of-life infrastructure, Comunet proposed an initial migration (or “lift and shift”) from their data centre to an AWS IAAS Cloud Environment together with a rebuild for key workloads running on legacy operating systems. Modern Disaster Recovery across multiple Availability Zones (AZ) was implemented along with backups and long-term storage of data. The multi-AZ Disaster Recovery was to be achieved using Cloud Endure.

Once complete, Comunet put forward recommendations to right-size and optimise core systems and processes to drive further efficiency and performance benefits utilising services such as Amazon RDS and CloudWatch as well as implementing AWS Direct Connect.

Lessons Learned

The major lessons learned and shared with the client included the benefit of using additional tools around the AWS environment as well as overall cost management through Reserved Instances.