Cloud Infrastructure Solution
Migration of on-premise IT environment to Amazon Web Services
For more than 150 years, AnglicareSA has supported South Australians in need. 1800 staff and more than 600 volunteers support nearly 62,500 people each year through diverse programs including parenting, youth, foster care, financial literacy, new-arrivals, Aboriginal services, disability care, emergency assistance, homelessness and aged care. AnglicareSA supports people to change their lives for the better.
The challenge
Anglicare SA had a comprehensive, well supported – but complex – ICT environment which serviced their broad, distributed staff and clients. A number or risks (both physical and virtual) were being managed well, however it was acknowledged that this complex environment and approach would not necessarily scale well.
Anglicare SA agreed on a need to continue focus on reduction of risks and streamlining of systems to support future growth and the provisioning of easily manageable business systems aligning to their overall business strategy.
Comunet has been designing and implementing IT strategies that leverage technology to achieve business objectives for small businesses through to enterprise organisations, 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.
The analysis
A TCO analysis was performed prior to the commencement of the project comparing on premise replacement costs vs cloud. Cost savings were identified around ongoing support services and reduced downtime, security and resilience around the solution.
The approach
Comunet proposed a strategic roadmap approach, including migration to IAAS and SAAS solutions on both AWS and Microsoft where appropriate while managing a hybrid, on-premise environment to ensure existing nvestments and knowledge was not put at risk.
To enhance current Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity measures, secured cloud backups to AWS S3 were recommended to be implemented on an intra-daily basis for key systems, while maintaining the core backups occurring on-premise environments (warm fail over environments in place).
With a plan for ongoing cost management and reduction, archive data (email databases, old files and backups) were planned to move to an Australian Region in AWS in long term, secured, Glacier storage. This solution would both deliver low-cost, high available long-term storage as well as reduce the capacity and bandwidth required between core disaster recovery environments (reducing large volumes of data that traditionally are backed up across both sites).
Following this, Comunet recommended developing a rolling 6-month plan to assess and identify business applications or services that could move to cloud, with rolling planning to design, deploy and support these environments ongoing.
The outcome
After performing an initial POC on AWS (for IAAS) and Microsoft (for Office 365 and other services), Anglicare signed off on the implementation of intra-day backups as well as long-term storage for archive data – which delivered the expected outcomes of decreasing Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for key systems as well as decreasing bandwidth requirements between key sites. Following these key projects, Anglicare SA have agreed to continue with rolling 6 month planning to identify and migrate other systems or hosting to cloud as part of an ongoing review.
