By Lilia Guan
One of Melbourne’s largest providers of water supply and sewage services – Yarra Valley Water has chosen IT service provider - Thomas Duryea Consulting (TD) – to upgrade its email platform from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2010.
The upgrade – staged through a tender process – requires TD to provide Yarra Valley Water with disaster recovery (DR) and cost efficiency targets.
Thomas Duryea chief executive officer, Andrew Thomas said the project was flagged as a business critical project under Yarra Valley Water’s IT
Disaster Recover Improvement Program.
The utility provider was keen to put in place an email platform which delivered the level of resiliency and availability required to support their existing and future needs, he said.
Mr Thomas told Government News the project was nothing new for the service provider, as governments at all levels understand the value of email to organisations.
“We’ve got more than 11 years of heritage working with both state and local governments in Victoria and NSW,” he said.
“A lot of these governments haven’t upgraded their mail servers since 2003 and are now seriously looking at upgrading.
“If you would’ve asked these organisations about email five years ago, they would’ve said it was a secondary platform on an ERP system, looked after by human resources.”
Mr Thomas said governments now do the majority of their communication and business through email.
“Councils interact with their constituents, services, councillors all through email, so it impacts right across the board when an email server crashes,” he said.
“IT departments need to go to the business managers and ask them what the impact would be if there was no email for a day.
“Or what the impact would be if half a days worth of emails were lost.”
Mr Thomas said most organisations will say they can’t function properly without email and need to have minimal data loss, in case of a disaster.
“Customers that haven’t upgraded need to roadmap for the new year to do so,” he said.
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