Centacare taps 11:11 Systems to modernise DR and transform cyber resilience
Community services organisation takes the biggest technological leap forward in its history.
One of South Australia’s largest care-giving organisations, Centacare Catholic Community Services, has partnered with 11:11 Systems to overhaul its disaster recovery (DR) environment.
“It’s the biggest leap into the future the company has ever taken technologically in its 80-year history,” said Brenton Denney, ICT services manager, Centacare.
Two years into his role, Denney knew the non-profit faced critical challenges with its legacy infrastructure. The DR hardware had reached end of support in 2021, raising serious concerns about its reliability.
The DR system was not isolated from production, meaning a cyber attack could expose the primary systems and their backup environment to hackers, ransomware and other threats.
The IT team struggled to perform isolated testing of failover procedures, creating uncertainty about its ability to recover from a significant cyber incident.
In all, Centacare was struggling with costly, complex infrastructure that offered little more than high availability and posed serious challenges if the organisation suffered an incident.
Transforming towards modern cyber resilience
While infrastructure is not at the forefront of Centacare’s activities, it must support the delivery of more than 60 community care programs across 36 sites.
However, as a non-profit, time and resources were constrained, but Denney wanted to move beyond just fixing the hardware. After comparing options, Centacare turned to 11:11 Systems because it offered more than just replicating existing systems.
It has allowed Centacare to transform DR towards modern cyber resilience. It’s a lesson in the importance of fully quantifying downtime and other costs and translating it into measurable business impact. This includes revenue loss, regulatory penalties, customer churn and reputational damage.
“By comparing current risk exposure against the cost of a modern, tested and automated DR solution, leaders can present DR investment as a risk-reduction strategy with measurable ROI,” said Marc Beder, GM, APAC, 11:11 Systems.
Centacare opted for 11:11 to deliver DRaaS for Zerto, Veeam cloud backup and AWS cloud storage to provide a fully functional recovery environment.
By simplifying its DR infrastructure, Centacare has been able to focus resources on core service delivery rather than infrastructure management.
“It reduced the number of systems, lowered technical complexity, streamlined operational processes and consolidated vendor relationships,” Beder told CRN Australia.
The partnership has since expanded to include advice on Centacare DR policies and help with other challenges such as VMware renewals.
Beder said organisations facing legacy transformation should expect providers to assess architecture against business requirements as well as risk tolerance and cyber resilience needs.
“Always seek expert advice, don’t be afraid to question the status quo and always be open to new ideas,” he ended.