With a population of over 150,000, Redland City Council delivers municipal services to six residential islands spread along the southern coast of Moreton Bay in South-East Queensland between Brisbane and the Gold Coast.
Glynn Henderson, CIO, saw data as the lifeblood of his organisation. “We see our data as an incredibly important asset. We need to have a cradle-to-the-grave view of it across the organisation so we can use it to make better decisions for the residents and businesses in our community.”
“By using our data effectively, the possibilities are endless – we can improve internal efficiency, deliver strategic benefits, or drive greater economic, community, and environmental value. Rubrik ensures that wherever our data is, in whatever form it is, it is at our fingertips when we need it. It’s created excitement in the business, and it all comes back to data integrity.”
Manual Processes Hampering Strategic Initiatives
Prior to Rubrik, Redland City Council’s IT team was managing manual backup and data protection processes on an aging and out-of-support solution that was experiencing drive failures. “Backups are now completely automated,” said Henderson. “My team doesn’t have to worry about them anymore so they’re now free to work on projects that bring more value to the organisation.”
“For example, when COVID-19 struck, we had to quickly ramp up our work-from-home capacity to manage a tripling of our remote workforce – we went from about 70 concurrent users on our VDI environment to 250 almost overnight. Because we weren’t losing time managing backups, we had more capacity to rapidly scale and refine our remote work capability.”
Respite Despite Rising Ransomware Attacks
Henderson said another side effect of COVID-19 was an alarming increase in the number of ransomware attacks levelled against Redland City Council. Despite the proliferation of attacks, Henderson said he was confident in the organisation’s resilience – even in the worst-case scenario.
“We’re witnessing an unprecedented level of ransomware attacks targeting our organisation, which I chalk up to attackers thinking councils are too preoccupied with COVID-19 to mount an effective defence.”
“While a cryptolocker attack would have severe consequences from a regulatory and reputational point of view, with Rubrik’s immutable backups and the ability to rapidly restore our environment if an attack were successful, I feel a lot more comfortable,” said Henderson. “It’s like an insurance policy against ransomware.”
Additional benefits include:
- Plug-and-play: “Once the decision was made to go with Rubrik, we were in production within two weeks. The simple deployment was one of the greatest benefits. Our team is under a lot of pressure to deliver on multiple projects, but this became one less thing to worry about.”
- Road map to the future: “We’re actively exploring the role cloud will play in our organisation, so we needed the ability to backup and migrate workloads to the cloud if we need it in the future.”
- Open data: “Previously, data sharing would be reactive and in response to external requests for Council data. With the data now at our fingertips, we’re on the front foot creating open data sets and ideating internally around what data we can proactively provide the community.”
- Faster test and dev: “When we want to launch a new service for the community, we can now rapidly stand up fenced environments for testing and development purposes. Previously, this process could take as long as two days between presenting storage, building VMs, and waiting for replication – with Rubrik, these environments are up-and-running in only half a day.”
- Increased operational efficiency: “Like most other organisations we’re frequently being asked to do more with less – we started off supporting 350 desktops 20 years ago to more than 1200 today with no increase to the infrastructure team behind it all. At its core, we needed backups, restores, and data protection to be simpler for the infrastructure team to look after. Now it’s not only simpler, it’s on autopilot.”
Learn more about ransomware recovery with Rubrik.