Enhanced security for eBusiness

This public body was established to deliver improved transport outcomes for local people. It is responsible for the movement of people and goods on roads, trains, buses, ferries, light rail, point to point transport vehicles, community transport, walking and cycling. It also oversees the delivery of multi-billion-dollar transport infrastructure through project delivery partners and industry experts.

When this public sector organisation in Oceania wanted to upgrade its legacy load balancers to enable the transition to a new data centre infrastructure, it was faced with a complex landscape. Ten ageing load balancers that were reaching end of life, were out of support and had capacity issues which had led to outages. They were also vulnerable to the thousands of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks which happened daily.

These network load balancers are critical to providing availability for crucial internal and external facing applications for eight million customers. It was therefore essential to plan a seamless migration which would not af fect the business.

Fujitsu has provided managed services to the organisation for almost 15 years, including application support, website support, safety cameras and vehicle registrations. This made it the ideal partner to plan and execute the migration to a new set of F5 load balancers.

Experienced Fujitsu engineers with in-depth knowledge of the client collaborated closely with F5 to design a highly resilient solution comprised of four F5 BIG-IP physical devices supporting 16 virtual load balancers. The team undertook six months of careful planning and application assessment to ensure the phased migration approach caused zero business disruption.

There was also significant user engagement and rigorous testing to minimise the impact of the move. This resulted in the organisation enjoying a scalable, robust and well-protected load balancing environment that can flex to cope with the demands of the modern IT environment.

“Extensive planning and intensive user consultation made sure we didn’t impact things too much,” explains the public sector representative. “Everything went smoothly, and we avoided having to take services of fline.”

This is thought to be the largest load balancing project in the Oceanic region, so its success was vital. Fujitsu and F5’s careful planning paid of f and the organisation enjoyed a seamless transition with minimal disruption to vital services. Its new load balancers can flex up and down as required while preventing malicious attacks instantly.

At the same time, high priority incidents have reduced from 62 to just two in one year. This saves around 900-man hours per year, while also guaranteeing better availability. The F5 environment also provides the requisite functionality for a future cloud transition with a more standardised architecture. This futureproofs the investment for planned cloud migrations.

“Fujitsu was easy to deal with and helped us actively track and mitigate risks to enable a smooth and seamless transition,” concludes the public sector representative. “It stopped the DDoS attacks instantly, saving our team lots of headaches and improving the customer experience.”