Selecting Macquarie Telecom hosting solution, a smart decision for BizEd Services

Company: BizEd Services

Web: www.bized.com.au

Key business focus: To provide the infrastructure solutions to support learning and development requirements of leading Australian businesses.

Key challenge: To find a hosting partner that would meet stringent security standards and provide 24x7 availability.

Macquarie Telecom products and services: Managed dedicated firewalls, clustered dedicated load balancers, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 in a cluster configuration, load balanced server farms for all applications, web servers, and 24x7 support and management reporting capabilities.

• capacity to scale up to 400 per cent without additional infrastructure
• new system meets BizEd's customers' stringent security requirements
• fully redundant infrastructure

Switch to hosting at Intellicentre delivers unprecedented security and availability.

"Macquarie Telecom was the only organisation that got a tick in the box for all of our requirements. The company also demonstrated an in-depth knowledge of our business and a deep technical understanding, which really made them stand out from the crowd."
Peter Goldrick,
Managing Director, Bized Services

Overview

Maintaining the systems and processes to manage employee learning and development has moved from being an HR issue to having compliance ramifications across an entire organisation.

Business and government need to ensure staff are not only regularly trained, but prove they have met certain competency standards in line with current legislation. For even a medium sized organisation this can represent a huge administrative task and automation is essential – putting increased demands on existing IT infrastructure and resources.

For many organisations it is not feasible to purchase the entire infrastructure to support theses additional learning and development requirements. Nor is it possible to create the storage capacity for all the results and records that compliance requirements demand.

This is where BizEd Services steps in. A leading Australian provider of outsourced learning and development services, BizEd delivers a broad array of infrastructure requirements for clients such as Australian Defence Industries, Coles Myer Limited, John Fairfax Holdings, Victorian Department of Justice and the Victorian Department of Education and Training.

When you're responsible for maintaining the training records of some of Australia's top defence and government agencies, you want to make sure those records are secure. And when these clients all run their own training systems and maintain confidential databases, you want to make sure that you've got a system that can scale accordingly.
BizEd has implemented a complex managed hosting solution from Macquarie Telecom, located at the state of the art Intellicentre in Sydney, to meet its high availability and security needs.

The Opportunity

BizEd's service offering is comprehensive, not only does it develop the infrastructure to support its customer's learning and development needs, it also hosts, administers and maintains the security of each individual system.

Not that its customers are aware of any complexity – each customer receives a tailored service that is seamlessly integrated with their own business functions.

BizEd was forced to switch from its existing hosting provider because it was unable to meet the high levels of security its top customers required. As a result, the company's goal was to find a Managed Hosting partner that would meet its complex needs, but help it present simplified services to its customers.

According to Peter Goldrick, Managing Director, BizEd, security, redundancy and availability were the company's top three requirements from an IT services partner.

“Redundancy and availability were easily achieved, but we were looking for a provider that also had security certifications from industry bodies and, specifically, had Department of Defence clearance. The high levels of security are imperative for our defence, and banking/finance customers as we host all their training records for compliance purposes,” said Goldrick.

“Macquarie Telecom was the only organisation that got a tick in the box for all three requirements. The company also demonstrated an in- depth knowledge of our requirements and a deep technical understanding, which really made them stand out from the crowd,” added Goldrick.

The Solution

Macquarie Telecom designed and implemented a managed hosting solution that provides BizEd with a high-availability service through a fully redundant infrastructure with no single point of failure. It also offers the capacity to scale by at least 400 per cent to accommodate future growth – without requiring any additional hardware or architectural changes.

The Macquarie Telecom design includes: managed dedicated firewalls, clustered dedicated load balancers, Microsoft SQL Server 2000 in a cluster configuration, load balanced server farms for all applications, Web servers, and 24x7 support and management reporting capabilities.

The solution is hosted at the Intellicentre, Macquarie Telecom's state of the art hosting facility that is certified to BS 7799 and DSD Gateway security standards.

The clustered SQL Server design allows BizEd to run multiple, ‘virtual' SQL instances that each hold separate databases to support different versions of the primary web application.

“From a complex hosting perspective, this is leading edge but proven technology,” said Glen Noble, General Manager Data and Hosting, Macquarie Telecom. “Clustering servers significantly reduces down-time which in turn increases customer revenue. This business benefit coupled with the increased security makes managed hosting a cost-effective solution for a company like BizEd, where mission critical applications and data need to be available 24x7.”

The Results

Taking just three months from initial scoping to full performance, the Macquarie Telecom solution has delivered on all of BizEd's expectations.

“Technically, our target was to create a reliable system that could scale up. The Macquarie Telecom solution delivers the highest levels of scalability at minimal impact on budget, and is bullet proof from a security point of view. Everything has been stable since day one – Macquarie Telecom has really helped us take our business to the next level,” said Goldrick.

With its high-availability, secure hosting solution, BizEd is now able to drive performance improvements and boost cost savings for customers through its learning and development infrastructure.