Discover the remarkable IT Transformation and journey to Zero Trust Security and Essential 8 compliance of MidCoast Council in our latest case study! This pioneering project facilitated the successful merger of three Councils and a Water Authority, streamlining their operations for enhanced efficiency.

The comprehensive solution spanned across an impressive network of over 80 IT-enabled sites, covering a vast 10,000 sqm LGA. To ensure uninterrupted service, the project included a highly resilient network design with redundant connectivity to critical sites and high-availability data centres. Among the deployed infrastructure were 6 ultra-high-density servers, 2 NVMe all-flash storage arrays, 109 switches, 157 access points, 79 firewalls, and 29 routers.

Our team equipped the system with cutting-edge technology from industry leaders Cisco, Check Point, and Pure Storage. This combination allowed us to implement numerous industry-first features in the Australian market, setting new standards for IT infrastructure.

Curious to explore the details of this ground-breaking multi-year, multi-million dollar project? Delve into the full case study here.

The Check Point customer success video on the security solution that S5 Technology Group deployed at MidCoast Council can be found here.

Improved security posture and performance for Expressway Spares with Check Point

With 5 branches across the nation and customers including some of the biggest construction and mining companies worldwide, Expressway Spares is a major supplier to the Earthmoving Industry.  S5 Technology Group are their trusted IT partner, providing specialised expertise to a skilled internal team.

When Expressway sought to update their ageing MPLS network, they called on S5 to help design the network solution, which features a star topology inter-branch VPN based on Check Point firewalls.

Legacy MPLS connections delivering between 4 and 10 Mbps were replaced across branches in Sancrox, the Hunter Valley, Perth, Mackay and Gunnedah.  TPG supplied new fibre optic links with 100, 200 and 500 Mbps symmetrical being deployed commensurate with branch requirements.

Expressway also implemented redundant connectivity across fully duplicated data centres at their headquarters in Sancrox, on the NSW Mid North Coast.  S5 provided a high availability solution utilising BGP, with Cisco border routers chosen for their automated failover capabilities.

HTTPS inspection was rolled out on a staggered basis to minimise impact on daily operations, while Cisco Duo was deployed in a high-availability setup to enable MFA for remote access to the corporate network and ERP.

The solution allows Expressway to ratchet down security for their on-premises ERP, while pushing their collaboration suite workload to the cloud with the migration of local Windows server shares to SharePoint and OneDrive.  This eases maintenance and administration burden, while progressing towards their ACSC Essential 8 compliance target.

Check Point endpoint protection, email scanning and threat extraction was also rolled out, with complete and seamless integration and a ‘single pane of glass’ management interface.

A significant benefit of the solution is the ease at which sites or bandwidth can be added as required, with the Check Point firewalls able to scale to match.

Expressway Spares have significantly improved their security posture while adding insight, ease of management and high availability.  All of this was achieved while realising significant cost savings.

Backup and Disaster Recovery refresh eases flood stress and adds ransomware resilience for Forbes Shire Council

As the flood waters rose around NSW in 2022, Forbes Shire Council called on S5 to freshen up their backup and Disaster Recovery solution.

Over time, the existing solution had grown adhoc, become complicated to manage, and recovery tests were failing.

Leveraging council’s internal IT team’s experience with Veeam, S5 designed an elegant solution incorporating replication to a secondary data centre owned by council and immutable (unable to be changed once written) snapshots to carefully selected cloud storage.

Forbes Shire Council now has multiple options and sites available for recovery.

Recovery times, costs and admin burden were all greatly reduced while adding critical resilience to ransomware.

Uneventful Disaster Recovery level up for Stannies College

St Stanislaus’ College, or ‘Stannies’, is an independent day and boarding school for up to 600 students from Year 7 to Year 12.  The IT network is core to school operations, and as a boarding school, demand is 24/7.

 With a legacy system nearing end of life and out of support, Stannies called on S5 Technology Group to give their data centre a refresh.

 Compact and power-efficient Dell equipment was specced, deployed as a 3-node VMware cluster backed by an all-flash storage array.

Veeam backup was configured, including snapshots to Wasabi immutable storage in the cloud.

 The entire solution was engineered in S5’s workshop, and deployment was completed seamlessly with no noticeable impact to the college.  Backups which previously took hours to run are now completed in minutes, with commensurately faster restore times, together with the ransomware resilience of immutable storage.  S5 made this DC refresh uneventful in the best way possible – Stannies improved their disaster recovery and security posture with minimal interruption, all while reducing costs.

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