With downtime counted in hours instead of months, the island’s legacy system has been upgraded to prepare for border reopenings.
Off the coast of Singapore, a little resort island called Sentosa has also had to undergo transformation during the pandemic when tourist arrivals have dwindled.
The 500-hectare resort island, run by Sentosa Development Corporation (SDC), is home to an array of themed attractions including Singapore’s first integrated resort, Resorts World Sentosa.
In view of the need to keep up with the sudden onset of virtual tourism, e-commerce and cybersecurity risks, the island’s management sought to simplify its IT infrastructure, improve service availability and also spruce up data center disaster recovery protocols, with the longer-term view towards moving to a hybrid cloud environment.
Furthermore, SDC required a platform that would allow it to run its applications as plug-ins to an overall ecosystem and mitigate maintenance scheduling challenges. This architecture would allow applications on the upgraded ecosystem to run seamlessly and create a layer of security at the application level that meets the Singapore high standards of security.
With these requirements in mind, the island chose a solution from Nutanix to make real-time replication during data center failure/disaster recovery possible. The rest of the legacy IT infrastructure was turned into a homogenous platform with an infrastructure-as-a-service architecture.
Meeting requirements with minimal downtime
The deployment was made within hours and not months, and the upgraded system offers simplified operations, in turn making improved service delivery possible. With less time being spent on maintenance, the island’s IT division now has more time and resources to plan other improvements in service delivery and innovation.
In terms of data management, the revamp has brought Recovery Time Objective down to about one to two hours, from four hours previously. Going forward the plan is to bring the recovery point objective down to zero and RTO to a bare minimum, to enable real-time replication during data center failure/disaster recovery.
Finally, with the system running on an infrastructure-as-a-platform mode there is no negative impact during system downtime/patching. This helps to meet the Single Loss Expectancy requirements more effectively, to allow critical business and applications can stay up and running.
The Nutanix cloud platform also lets apps run as plug-ins, so SDC now has the ability to do capacity planning, just-in-time provisioning, and make better use of resources in their environment.
This digital transformation is expected to future-proof the resort’s systems.
