Press Release

Holroyd switches to Civica’s managed services for disaster recovery

July 1, 2009

Holroyd City Council, a large metropolitan authority in western Sydney, has outsourced the disaster recovery of its core business applications to Civica.

Under the disaster recovery setup, the Holroyd server running Civica’s Authority local government enterprise management solution is replicated nightly to Civica’s data centre in Sydney, which in turn is mirrored to the company’s Melbourne data centre.

Council chose to move to Civica’s disaster recovery service because it was assessed as a robust solution for having Disaster Recovery covered by a professional and experienced organisation, plus the knowledge that Authority can be restored to full processing with no data loss, and without restoring data physically or rebuilding servers.

Council’s Information Technology Services Manager, Ian Bertram, said that in Civica’s virtualised environment, in the extreme event of a disaster, their Authority applications could be accessed through a laptop in a remote location if required.

“We can set up virtually anywhere and have a fully operational Authority system and that’s pretty good service delivery to our community.”

“Council has a number of business critical systems including paying staff, processing development applications and certificates, receipting and maintaining finance and asset modules. The new disaster recovery setup protects these key business areas, as well as the rest of Council’s business.”

“We are very happy with Civica’s Disaster Recovery solution,” said Ian. “I receive a transaction log notification daily and it just keeps on working. If there’s a crash, our data would be transferred back to our server from the data centre. The setup gives us great peace of mind.”

Previously Holroyd physically backed up the Authority server each day to 1TB USB disks, and had these taken off-site for safekeeping. In the event of a server crash, the disks would need to be recalled and loaded, and Civica called upon to feed data back into the system, taking several days before being operational.

Using Civica’s disaster recovery services, Council is guaranteed a data centre environment ready for use within 24-hours of service activation.

“We find the standard of service is satisfactory for our current purposes”

Covering 39.89 sq km in Western Sydney, City of Holroyd has a population of 94,000, including 35,000 ratepayers. Council has an annual budget of $75 million and currently employs the equivalent of more than 450 full time staff.