Access to clean running water is essential to daily life, from basic hygiene to food preparation. Interruptions in water supply can affect entire communities and have a devastating effect on quality of life. Although factors such as droughts are beyond human control, there are several crucial components of water management systems that can be enhanced through technology. Cloudlogic was appointed to undertake this task for the eThekwini Municipality.

The Challenge:

The eThekwini Water and Sanitation Unit is responsible for the provision of water and sanitation services, but encountered several operational issues caused by outdated and fragmented legacy infrastructure. Their systems did not provide a consolidated view of crucial apps and lacked real-time insights into system performance and security. This resulted in the team being reactive, and in most cases, interventions were too late to prevent mission-critical problems.

Mr. Rajiv Singh, Senior Manager from the Information Management Unit, said that his department had procured Microsoft System Centre, but spent over five years figuring out how to extract value from it. “We attempted multiple projects over the first few years but each project was stand-alone and did not deliver the value we were looking for” he said.

The Geographical Information System (GIS) team also encountered significant hurdles. Their intensive applications for real-time mapping of the city required far greater performance than that being delivered by the IT infrastructure at the time; therefore, security threats and patterns could not be proactively monitored and systems could not be put in place to mitigate such risks.

Our Approach:

Cloudlogic used a hybrid approach with a combination of on-premise and cloud infrastructure. A cloud-based operations management platform helped the eThekwini team to shift from a reactive to a proactive stance for performance and security monitoring, enabling early detection of operational risks.

The on-site teams work with crucial applications, which were fragmented across their IT infrastructure. Cloudlogic worked closely with the development team to understand the applications that were critical to operations and then consolidated these fragmented pieces into a single-pane view for easy management and monitoring of critical services.

“We were hoping to gain insight into the operations of our infrastructure – its health, vulnerabilities, capacity and performance. Lawrence had a great understanding of what we were trying to achieve. With Cloudlogic, we have utilised our investment in Microsoft technologies to gain deeper insight into the status and performance of our entire server infrastructure” said Mr. Singh.

The Benefits:

• Proactive monitoring of the entire IT infrastructure.
• The team can respond much faster to potential outages and mitigate them through proactive operations management using OMS.
• Downtime has been significantly reduced, almost to zero.
• Systems and business apps run more efficiently through performance insights via OMS, which has improved operational efficiency.
• Data is protected and securely backed up for recovery.