Cloud Infrastructure Strategy

Mount Barker District Council (MBDC) is a local government area located just outside of the Adelaide metropolitan area in South Australia. The district's current population is approximately 41,500, and is one of the fastest-growing regions in the state.

The Mount Barker district has been growing at around 3% per annum since 2015 with the population expected to reach 55,606 by 2036.

Comunet has been designing and implementing IT strategies that leverage technology to achieve business objectives for 25 years. With expertise across all areas of IT including strategic consulting, cloud technology, cyber security, and software. Comunet helps clients on their digital transformation journey. Through their partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), they deliver the best technology solutions effectively and efficiently.

Council’s production IT Infrastructure had resided in Private Cloud IaaS since 2014. And with approximately 185 network users across 8 sites, the ICT Team supports 72 applications and supporting infrastructure.

Mount Barker District Council used this opportunity to review its technical architecture and how IT infrastructure services are provided to the organisation.

A tight deadline was in place for exiting the existing Private Cloud environment which required a streamlined approach for migration to reduce risk and complete the migration quickly.

Comunet used their partner, Amazon Web Services (AWS), to meet the requirements of MBDC Public Cloud migration by migrating MBDC servers and storage to Amazon Web Services (Sydney Region). Being the largest provider of infrastructure as a service globally, AWS offers numerous networking services, server (compute), and storage services.

Comunet undertook the migration based on the AWS Professional Service Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) Methodology. Comunet have trained and worked alongside AWS Professional Services to deliver this program to customers and have the experience and capability to deliver a migration methodology that is based on best practices from hundreds of customer migration projects.

In the Design and Planning stage, Comunet evaluated the migration strategy for all MBDC applications. Comprehensive planning was carried out to either rehost or replatform the servers and applications onto the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform.

Deploying AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) established the virtual computing environments for the MBDC servers. The server instances were provisioned on demand and right sized based on actual usage. This enables MBDC to only pay for the resources utilised, reducing the need to forecast future capacity and traffic requirements.

The project required the establishment of an internet service for the MPLS via the AWS network. This required Comunet and the AWS Networking team to develop a solution with AWS Direct Connect Gateway, AWS Transit Gateway and FortiGate Firewall that connected eight sites and delivered a cost-effective high-speed internet connection.