“Disaster recovery is extremely important to our business. As an Australia-wide company, an IT disaster could impact our operations across the country. With Huon IT’s disaster recovery service, we feel confident that if anything happens to our servers in the data centre, our business will be able to continue without disruption.” – Vincent ten Krooden, Head of Technology, Mortgage Choice.

Mortgage Choice has long understood the importance of Disaster Recovery as a Service. As a national company with franchises across Australia, they know that physical server damage or system failure could shut down operations on a significant scale. Peter Abila, Mortgage Choice’s infrastructure engineer, is the one tasked to keep the system running 100% of the time – a responsibility he takes seriously.

Their primary challenges were cost, service, and flexibility: in the past, they had been tied to long-term contracts that were excessively expensive and that didn’t provide the level of service they wanted.

“We were using Zerto and Microsoft Azure, and were self-managing the system,” Peter says. “Huon IT was a more affordable solution. In addition to the cost benefits, they would be the ones to manage it – freeing up our internal resources to focus on other things”.

• Initial design and setup. Mortgage Choice’s team of technicians worked closely together with Huon IT to design the solution to ensure maximum Disaster Recovery protection for the business.
• Zerto replication of Mortgage Choices production system to Huon IT’s standby systems. By replicating Mortgage Choice’s system from Sydney to Huon IT’s state-of-the-art data centre in Melbourne via Zerto, Mortgage Choice now has the peace of mind that comes from knowing they have geographic redundancy across states.
• Managed firewall including VPN connectivity, providing encryption and data security.
• DR maintenance and replication reporting to ensure all systems are functioning properly on an ongoing basis.
• Bi-annual bubble test failover. Every six months, Huon IT runs a failover test to ensure that in the event of a disaster, data and applications can be recovered and restored in the shortest amount of time possible.

According to Peter, the project was a success.“I was very pleased with Huon IT’s support team,” he says. “They’re responsive and upbeat. During the implementation period, the Project Manager gave me day-to-day visibility into everything that was going on.”

Post-implementation, Peter says that the system is running smoothly and that Huon IT proactively reaches out if there are any issues.

• Affordability, flexibility, and quality.
• System management by Huon IT.
• Geographic redundancy.
• Rapid recovery time objective.
• Regular failover testing.
• Pay-as-you-use pricing structure.