Case Study – Victorian Legal Membership Firm

Cloud Solutions Group with Dell and Zerto successfully delivers an innovative Hybrid Cloud Solution.

Value Delivered

Immediate cost savings- 70% monthly and $1 million dollars over 3 years

Best practice Hybrid solution

Reduced operational complex

Enhanced data resiliency

Scalable, fit for purpose and cost-effective solution

Improved productivity

Improved user experience

Technology Used

Dell R740xd servers

VMware VSAN

Veeam

Zerto Cloud DRaaS

The client

Founded in mid 1800’s this legal membership firm is recognised by businesses, government and the general public as the leader of the legal profession in Victoria. With thousands of members on their books, the organisation represents a potent force of opinion and expertise. The firm is able to shape the nature and reputation of the legal profession, and influence reforms to the justice system.

A non-profit organisation dedicated to benefitting its members and the development, maintenance and the sustenance of the law for the benefit of the community.

CHALLENGES

Several years ago, the client took a cloud first approach and migrated a majority of their infrastructure to the Public Cloud. Some of their key applications took the SaaS route. Office 365 was the chosen tool for Productivity and Collaboration and Citrix was utilised for Remote Access and Disaster Recovery enablement.

· The solution was working well and satisfying the business’ technology needs, but the public cloud cost kept creeping up every month. Being a non-for-profit organisation, it was getting difficult for management to justify the rising operational cost of IT without any added additional benefit.

· Managements perception that cloud adoption will be inexpensive and reduce costs.

Our Approach

We spent a lot of time collaborating with the client understanding their requirements and frustrations with the Cloud solution. The process we undertook was:

· An options analysis of the available solutions in the market with a recommendation as to what was best fit for the client. Including ways to decrease the costs of the public cloud environment.

· An in-depth ROI analysis to ensure that the numbers stack up over the next 3 years and the savings are significant.

· A solution architecture of the end state solution.

· Implementation of the solution with the client.

The Solution Delivered:

The solution provided many improvements over their existing architecture:

A Solution that fits business financial needs

Achieves significant reduction (approximately 70%) in Data Centre monthly operational expenditure.

Reduced complexity & improve agility

An overall technical architecture that’s easily manageable by a small IT team. We established an agile and dynamic ICT environment that is fit for purpose which can flexibly scale with the business

Repatriation from All Cloud to Hybrid Cloud

Bring back key infrastructure components that do not benefit from the Public Cloud model to on-premises. Use public cloud as disaster recovery and back up target.

Highly available and robust working environment

A state-of-the-art automated disaster recovery solution achieved using Zerto which meets clients RPO and RTO. We are using the Public Cloud for backup and archival and meet clients 7-year data retention compliance obligations.

Improved end user experience with enhanced collaboration and flexibility

Office 365 and Citrix Virtual desktop are delivering the flexible and collaborative environment that the customer needs to provide their staff an efficient, easy to use and feature rich remote working solution.

The end user experience was enhanced by the use of an on-premises All-Flash Dell vSan solution.

Cost savings

We reduced the monthly Cost of the solution by approximately 70% which equates to nearly $1 million dollars over 3 years!

Technology

· New Dell R740xd servers with All Flash disks at their Melbourne Data centre to repatriate their key workloads.

· VMware VSAN to provide the hyperconverged capability and resiliency. .

· Veeam as the key back-up and archival tool utilising S3 storage as the backup target.

· We are utilising Zerto Cloud DRaaS to replicate workloads between the Cloud and on-premises VMware. Zerto also delivers the Disaster Recovery automation, which simplifies the process of recovery in a disaster.

The Cloud Solutions Group USP:

· We are vendor-agnostic- we delivered the right solution for the client, as opposed to the standard vendors.

· We are leaders in technology solutions for Legal and Business services sector.

· We have over 10 years of industry experience delivering solutions.