Centacare modernises, secures and automates Disaster Recovery with 11:11 Systems

Centacare Catholic Community Services has revealed how it modernised its disaster recovery practices with the assistance of 11:11 Systems. Founded in 1942 as the Catholic Family Welfare Centacare Catholic Community Services, it is one of South Australia’s largest providers of social and community support. It uses an evidence-based approach to deliver 62 community services from 36 sites in metropolitan Adelaide and regional South Australia.

The organisation, like other non-profits, had underinvested in its disaster recovery solutions. Long-term employee, Brenton Denney, Manager of ICT services at Centacare, identified the risk that the organisation faced. It used hardware that was no longer available as of 2016 and went out of support in 2021.

The key issue is that the solution is potentially unmaintainable, and its reliability is in question. They were also unable to adequately test for a full disaster recovery situation.

With growing risks such as a cybersecurity incident, the lack of an air gapped DR solution within the organisation put it at risk should it be subject to a ransomware attack. Denney needed to identify a modern cloud-based solution that would provide a suitable disaster recovery solution that would mitigate the risks highlighted. With the additional issues of supporting local hardware, Centacare identified and selected 11:11 Systems.

Why 11:11 Systems?

It was the 11:11 Systems consultative approach that most impressed Denney, more than the solution itself.  Denney commented, “Every other provider we spoke to started by asking what we were currently doing and then proposed a solution that replicated it. That might have fixed the hardware issue, but not the network or resilience problems.

“Instead, 11:11 Systems began by asking a simple but powerful question: ‘Why are you doing it this way?’ No one else challenged our thinking like that, and it led to a broader conversation about doing it better, not just differently.”

Working with 11:11 Systems Centacare released it needed to find a solution that would keep the organisation mission moving  forward, minimize expense and provide resilience, DR and high availability into the future. It could not just consider replacing what it had with a modern solution, it wanted something that was future proof.

Centacare opted for a mix of technology to achieve its objective. These included:

• 11:11 Disaster Recovery as a Service for Zerto
• 11:11 Cloud Backup for Veeam Cloud Connect
• 11:11 Object Storage for AWS

Now deployed, the solution has delivery Centacare with a proactive disaster recovery solution, one that it has confidence in, in a DR test or a full blown DR scenario. Centacare has a air-gapped DR solution that gives its board the risk mitigation it needed. There were added benefits as well. The new solution cuts its Azure data storage in half when compared to the 11:11 Systems AWS S3 compatible storage.

Those savings have now been reinvested in immutable backup storage capabilities, further securing the organisation’s mission-critical data.

Denney concluded, “This remains the hardest project I’ve managed, but also the most fulfilling and exciting in terms of the capability it brought to Centacare. The technology that 11:11 employs is simply amazing. When I first started working in IT, I never could have imagined having this type of resilience capability. If you tried explaining it to me back then, I would’ve said it was impossible.”

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

Centacare was impressed by its partnership with 11:11 Systems. Since the initial project, it has further investigated and selected their backup as a service offering as well. Many organisations may believe they have a disaster recovery solution, but few will actually test it fully.

One of the key aspects that gave Denney comfort about the 11:11 approach is that not only could it back up their data, it also offered a new “clean” location for a restore to occur. In the event of a ransomware attack, this is critical to protect the organisation from the complete disaster of being unable to recover data.

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