Southern Rural Water outsources disaster recovery

With the threat of a natural disaster impacting its operations, Southern Rural Water (SRW) looked to a fully managed disaster recovery service to minimise risk to its business, and protect the organisation’s ability to operate in the face of several disasters.

SRW is a Victorian government authority responsible for managing rural water resources across the southern half of country Victoria. These resources include dams, irrigation and surface water, and groundwater licences for farmers, graziers and growers.

With business centres and field staff spread across southern Victoria, SRW needed a business continuity plan to support its remote sites and ensure it could cope with the real threat of natural disasters in these areas. In recent years, SRW has been impacted by the threat of several natural disasters including floods in the Gippsland area, bushfires in the east, mine collapse and severe drought in the west.

These situations placed increased pressure on SRW to have a robust business continuity plan in place to be ready for a disaster. According to SRW ICT Manager Amit Khairajani, “From recent experience we understand that disasters can and do occur, so we need to be prepared.”

In reviewing its business continuity plan, SRW recognised that its traditional tape backup system posed a significant risk to the organisation with regard to the time it would take to recover its environment, with no guarantee that it could recover fully.

The challenge for SRW was to find a solution that would allow it to recover 100% from a disaster within an acceptable timeframe and with minimal impact to the organisation and its customers. SRW provides water for irrigation for farmers and automates provision of water using flume gates which are all computer operated. As Khairajani explains, “If our computer systems were down it would mean that we could cause significant damage to water channels and river beds, destroy crops from flooded farms and cause harm to communities from flooded roads and towns. It is therefore critical that services are running 24/7, regardless of any event.”

SRW looked at a range of in-house and outsourced options to identify which would work best in their environment. A key factor in selecting a solution was a guarantee that it will work when needed. According to Khairajani, “One of the key criteria in selecting a solution was the guarantee that it will enable us to recover fully — there is no point in investing in a solution if there is even a small chance that it won’t work when it is most required.”

SRW selected Global Storage’s fully managed disaster recovery service EnvironmentReady as the right solution to meet their business continuity needs. EnvironmentReady utilises the latest server virtualisation, data deduplication and replication technology to enable organisations to align application recovery to business requirements.

EnvironmentReady was seen to be ‘the perfect fit’ for SRW as it manages the risks associated with data loss and IT systems downtime. It provides SLAs that guarantee data is being automatically backed up and replicated off site and has an agreed response time following a declared disaster.

As Khairajani explains, “The Global Storage solution was bulletproof. With guaranteed SLAs on recovery of data, it provided us the peace of mind that our data can be recovered within the required timeframe.”

Being a fully managed service, the EnvironmentReady solution also meant that SRW did not have to attain or acquire its own skilled and expensive resources to manage and maintain the solution. It proved to be more cost beneficial to pay a monthly fee versus the cost associated with setting up and running a secondary site for disaster recovery.

“The total net present value over 5 years was more cost effective for the Global Storage solution than having a redundant site set up with additional software licences and infrastructure which depreciates. A managed service such as EnvironmentReady does not have to provide a return on assets, as there is no capital expenditure, and demonstrates better net present value (NPV) compared with other solutions,” says Khairajani.

The most significant benefit for SRW in implementing EnvironmentReady, enterprise managed disaster recovery, is the knowledge that it has provided absolute protection of its data and it can recover the whole environment within 24 hours.