The Customer
The Real Estate Institute of Victoria (REIV) is the peak body for real estate professionals representing more than 5000 individuals and 2000 businesses in Victoria since 1936. They currently employ around 100 in their head office in Victoria. Their mission is to enhance the professional excellence of their members to the benefit of the communities they work within, and to advocate and represent their interests. In order to promote ongoing exchange of ideas and provide a platform for peer to peer support and development, REIV has an active culture of working through Chapters and Divisions and has a core committee that provides a forum to champion issues, ideas and opportunities.
The Challenge
Real Estate Institute of Victoria (REIV) hosted their workloads on their onsite data center. They were looking for a solution to address their aging onsite hardware which was nearing End of Support Life, with a view of driving down the total cost of operating their workloads onsite.
In addition, the data center had workloads running on single servers that would present points of failure for the applications’ availability. This required an uplift to include built-in disaster recovery, inline with the company’s recovery time and recovery point objectives (RTO/RPO).
Finally, the customer already had software assurance from Microsoft. However, they needed to ensure that their licensing is re-purposed in a public cloud scenario to help lower costs while maintaining availability, agility and performance.
The Solution
The AC3 team ensured REIV had a best practice Hybrid Cloud architecture in place, providing REIV with the highest level of security, and extending their data centers' reach beyond on-premise boundaries into the public cloud over Azure VPN/Networking technologies. The project was carried out over two phases:
Disaster Recovery as a Service designed and implemented using Microsoft Azure Site Recovery Technology. Migration of services from on-premise to the Melbourne Azure region. The initial deployment of the Disaster Recovery as a Service was implemented using Azure Site Recovery, ensuring the two external data centers were aligned with the organisational RTO/RPO requirements.
The second phase of the project was focused on assessing the remaining on premise workloads to determine a plan to get them ‘cloud ready’ for migration. A combination of IaaS and PaaS services were used to deliver a swift migration of the infrastructure. To add, REIV also took advantage of the Azure Hybrid Benefit , which helped them maximize the value of their existing on-premise Microsoft license investment while migrating to Azure.
The Results
Compliant Hybrid Cloud Disaster Recovery solution Best practice and compliant Hybrid cloud DR plan was designed, implemented and maintained by AC3 experts and engineers giving REIV the peace of mind that their infrastructure and applications are secured in case of disaster.
Having a true hybrid setup in place where a higher percentage of the workloads residing in Azure Enablement of a true Hybrid Cloud solution, with Azure Public Cloud becoming an extension of the on-premises data centers using Azure Site-to-Site VPN.