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. | 
