The Challenge
Our client is one of Australia's largest integrated facilities management service providers, with an extensive portfolio spanning public and private locations across the country.
Their business operations depended on several mission-critical IT applications. A critical risk was identified in one cloud application: it relied on a single cloud service instance backed by a single database instance — a single point of failure the organisation could not accept. Any unplanned outage of this application would have direct and immediate business impact.
Kodez was invited to propose a solution that would eliminate this risk.
The Solution
Kodez established a second cloud instance at a separate geographic location to remove the single point of failure.
Active/passive configuration
The second instance was deployed in a Microsoft Azure environment with two SQL Azure databases and the application stack configured as a REST API in a .NET framework. Both sites maintained their own independent application and database instances.
Intelligent traffic management
Azure Traffic Manager was configured to direct all transaction processing to the active cloud site, with automatic failover to the backup site triggered upon any failure condition. This active/passive approach provided the required resilience at a lower cost and complexity than an active/active configuration.
RTO/RPO optimisation
Kodez worked with both technical and business stakeholders to establish optimal Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) parameters tailored specifically to the application's operational requirements — ensuring the solution was right-sized for the business.
The Outcomes
The disaster recovery solution eliminated the single point of failure that had been identified as a critical business risk. The multi-site architecture also opened up opportunities for faster deployment management with minimal customer impact during maintenance windows.
"The DR solution provided by Kodez not only mitigated the risk of single point of failure, it opened up opportunities for faster deployment management with minimal customer impact."
