A worldclass risk management solution for a world class community hub
Home to major cultural attractions, world-class events, tourism experiences and an exceptional array of restaurants, bars and specialty stores, Federation Square is recognised as one of the world’s great public places.
DATA SOLUTIONS GROUP CASE STUDY / FEDERATION SQUARE
Federation Square is managed by Fed Square Pty Ltd, which was established by the Victorian Government in 1999. Fed Square Pty Ltd is responsible for the co-ordination and management of self-governing tenancies, programming and marketing of all the public spaces and all aspects of asset management and development.
Fed Square Pty Ltd has a board of Company Directors and operates with a Chief Executive Officer, and a small team of professionals with experience across a diverse range of areas including project management, finance, leasing, marketing, media and promotions, event management and operations. At the centre of Melbourne, noted for its remarkable public gatherings, Fed Square is a vibrant focus for visitors and locals and is host to over 2,000 events annually.
DATA SOLUTIONS GROUP CASE STUDY / FEDERATION SQUARE
Fed Square’s multi-faceted program encompasses Creative, Multimedia and Regular Events program streams, as well as coordinating a rich variety of third-party events, from the grand to the intimate. Since opening in 2002, Fed Square has seen more than 100 million visits and has recently been named the 6th Best Public Square of the World in a list of 10 international icons including Naghsh-e Jahaan Square in Iran and Red Square (Krasnaya ploshchad) in Moscow, Russia.
Challenges • Better IT risk management • Disaster recovery solution • Cost-effective scalability
Chief Information Officer Rory Murphy headed the project on behalf of Fed Square. “Fed Square held data within two onsite locations, two blocks apart. This situation did not adhere to best practice guidelines for IT risk management, and we wanted to alleviate risk by following best risk management practice.” This meant a third, geographically diverse, location to host their replicated data, in addition to the capability to recover workloads in the event of disaster.
DATA SOLUTIONS GROUP CASE STUDY / FEDERATION SQUARE
Fed Square also needed to protect existing VMware environment with 20 production Virtual Machines and 10TB of storage. “We wanted a cost effective scalability, which easily integrated with our existing network.”
The process Data Solutions Group (DSG) provided Fed Square with a small Proof of Concept first.
“DSG provided Fed Square with an easy mechanism to migrate and test in Amazon Web Services (AWS), allowing Fed Square to gradually migrate to the cloud, and easily scale as required. This meant that we could alleviate much of the risk of the implementation.” The time taken to plan for the project delivery was a couple of weeks, and the solution itself only required allocation of some additional storage, which took about 48 hours. In fact, the most critical stage of the whole process was the actual setup which was configured in less than two hours.
DATA SOLUTIONS GROUP CASE STUDY / FEDERATION SQUARE
The Solution • Cloud Backup • Cloud Strategy
The results The advantages of the new solution are that Fed Square now has a complete disaster recovery plan, be it in AWS or different site.
“With the implementation of replication application to AWS, recovering from a disaster now means a matter of hours instead of days and weeks. Both solutions that have been implemented are easily upgraded for future expansion, without any business downtime. Any upgrades are easily and quickly implemented.” “Just as importantly, this has allowed us to transform our IT resources, which are now segmented to work on business related challenges, like testing out new product & services, for example video streaming.”
DATA SOLUTIONS GROUP CASE STUDY / FEDERATION SQUARE
Recovering from a disaster now means a matter of hours instead of days and weeks.
Final thoughts? “Data Solutions Group alleviated the risk of new dependencies by being there for support. DSG were reactive to any requests Fed Square had, with a great turnaround time.”
DATA SOLUTIONS GROUP CASE STUDY / FEDERATION SQUARE