After days of torrential rains had lashed the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales in late November 2023, the operations team at our customer's headquarters were growing fretful.

On the ground floor sat their on-premise data centre – critical for running not only their essential services, but all of their services. With water levels rising rapidly, and even more heavy downfalls forecast, the entire organisation was at risk of a catastrophic outage.

As a vital provider of disability and employment support within their community, this NDIS providers’ services were dependent on uninterrupted access to digital systems, including client records, communication platforms, and operational tools.

The potential downtime wasn’t just a technical issue. It threatened the continuity of services for vulnerable individuals and job seekers who rely on daily support from this provider. And not just for days, but months.

With the water rising, and time running short, our customer needed an urgent, ordered and reliable solution to safeguard their infrastructure and minimise service disruptions.

Within hours of receiving the emergency call, our team mobilised to assess the risks and develop a rescue plan. Working against the clock, we executed a comprehensive data centre evacuation strategy.

Key actions included:

• Risk Mitigation: We evaluated water ingress risks and identified critical systems requiring immediate relocation.
• Infrastructure Relocation: We partnered with our customer using a rehost strategy to rehost critical workloads to a cloud-based environment, ensuring remote access and business continuity. These included spinning up a total of 17 virtual machines, which included 5 Linux virtual machines, 10 Windows virtual machines, and 2 Windows SQL to allow for refactoring and rehosting SQL on Brennan’s private cloud before rehosting on Azure.
• Emergency Network Setup: We established redundant communication links to maintain connectivity during and after the relocation.
• Real-Time Monitoring: We deployed tools to monitor system health and performance during the migration to ensure stability.

Our team worked around the clock, coordinating with our customer’s staff, third-party providers, and emergency support to ensure the safety of equipment and data. What would normally take four weeks of careful, considered consultation and planning, we’d implemented in just 48 hours.

Despite the extraordinary challenges posed by the floods, our customer’s operations were uninterrupted:

- Zero Data Loss: All critical data and systems were successfully migrated without unplanned downtime or corruption.
- Continuity of Services: Our customer maintained essential services throughout the crisis, ensuring their clients experienced no disruption.
- Enhanced Resilience: Post-crisis, this customer adopted a hybrid cloud model, increasing their flexibility and preparedness for future emergencies.
- Peace of Mind: The swift action demonstrated a commitment to this customer’s mission of empowering people with disabilities and job seekers, even in the face of natural disasters.

Key Insights:

The emergency response not only safeguarded our customer’s operations during the crisis but also paved the way for future innovation. By embracing cloud-based infrastructure, this customer is now better equipped to handle unforeseen challenges while continuing to connect people with possibilities.