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    Sungard AS and MTI Help Keep Operations and IT Flowing At Southern Water

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    Overview

    logo-mti-southern-water-case-study-200x100

    When Southern Water—one of England’s largest water authorities—needed a more resilient IT infrastructure, they turned to MTI and Sungard AS. Now, they can continue to ensure water and wastewater gets where it needs to go, while moving IT transformation initiatives forward to deploy new IT services quickly, consistently and securely.

    Solutions

    • Colocation Services in two fully redundant Sungard AS data centers
    • Hosted Private Cloud for dedicated computing in a cloud environment
    • A hyperconverged Dell EMC VxRail infrastructure
    • Synchronous, bi-directional replication for higher resilience
    • Dell EMC Data Domain for backup and restoration
    • Security services by Trend Micro and Palo Alto Networks

    Results

    • Increased resilience for business operations and customer services
    • Ready to meet Water Services Regulation Authority (Ofwat), National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) and National Institute
      of Standards and Technology (NIST) regulations
    • Faster, consistent, and more secure service deployments
    • Easier transition to the cloud to advance transformation initiatives

    About the Company

    MTI is a technology services and solutions provider with operations across the UK, France and Germany. Its unique combination of IT transformation and cybersecurity expertise helps thousands of organizations leverage the latest technologies to modernize their IT operations, reduce operating costs and increase agility, while mitigating risk. Named Computer Reseller News’ 2019 Security VAR of the Year, MTI is a Sungard AS partner and one of only two Dell EMC Titanium partners in the UK.

    Sungard AS brought a flexible, customer-centric, can-do attitude into the engagement that was really refreshing. This was no ‘drive-by’ sale. Instead, Sungard AS built a genuine, deep, long-term partnership that worked extremely well for us and really well for Southern Water.”

    Chief Technology Officer,  MTI Technology

    Challenge

    Meeting regulations, increasing resilience

    When you’re charged with delivering water to 2.5 million customers a day and moving wastewater through 39,594 km of sewers, it takes more than just pipes to meet demands. It takes a resilient IT infrastructure.

    Southern Water’s service area spans East and West Sussex, Hampshire, Kent and the Isle of Wight, so meeting the needs of its customer base is daunting enough. But as a UK utility, Southern Water must meet Ofwat requirements, the Water Services Regulation Authority that oversees privatized companies in this sector—from monitoring their financial health to measuring how effectively they deliver services and interact with customers.

    Key to delivering those services is the IT environment supporting nearly 4,500 telemetry boxes as they monitor water flow 24/7 across Southern Water’s service area. Since the boxes transmit data about leaks or other abnormalities that could affect both the delivery and quality of water supplied, the IT infrastructure behind them must be highly resilient. If a consumer calls to report a leak or other incident, Southern Water also has a regulatory obligation to process those cases extremely quickly, so the systems that support call center operations must be highly available. To meet the strict standards of security regulators, customer data housed in those systems needs the highest level of protection.

    Lee Nolan, Chief Technology Officer at MTI, says increasing resilience and data protection were critical components of the utility’s IT transformation initiatives. “Southern Water has already digitised a lot of their customer services. So, from an IT perspective, their goal was to improve resilience and security, while continuing to automate operations wherever possible.”

    Demands exceed data center capacity

    However, putting its transformation plans into action would tax the aging systems in two existing data centers, owned by an external service provider. This was the perfect opportunity for MTI, Sungard AS and Dell Technologies to join forces and step up to transform Southern Water’s IT environment.

    “We provided an ecosystem of partners who each brought the best skills to bear as a group, making a very compelling reason for Southern Water to select us,” says Nolan. “Sungard AS is the world’s leading DR resilience partner from a facilities perspective, and Dell Technologies leads in the technology space. As prime contractor, MTI could bring the infrastructure and security together, then deploy and deliver the architecture in the way that would give Southern Water what they needed.”

    Solution

    The project was awarded in October 2018, and the team worked to implement the new environment by the end of March 2019—when Southern Water’s contract with its former vendor expired.

    MTI and Dell Technologies designed and configured the private cloud infrastructure, a hyper-converged VxRail architecture that integrates compute, network, storage and virtualization resources to accelerate scalability and data center modernization.

    Sungard AS colocation services include hardened, enterprise-class data center facilities with the heating, cooling, power, network connectivity and redundancy required for always-on operations.

    To maximize resilience, Sungard AS installed the hardware infrastructure in two geographically separated data center facilities—London and Hounslow. Critical applications are split between the locations, including those supporting telemetry and call center operations, as well as SAP, Microsoft Exchange and Oracle solutions. Sungard AS cloud transformation consultants helped Southern Water’s internal team migrate workloads.

    A Dell Technologies data deduplication storage system backs up data, while synchronous, bi-directional replication between the two data centers ensures data protection and faster recovery if a disruption occurs.

    The team worked hard to manage the pressures of a compressed schedule. “Because of the partnership between MTI and Sungard AS, and our ability to be agile with regard to contractual and commercial arrangements, we met Southern Water’s very tight, very demanding deadline,” says Nolan.

    Results

    Fortified security defenses

    MTI implemented multiple layers of security solutions from VMware, Trend Micro and Palo Alto Networks to protect sensitive data as it flows into, out of, and across the network. As a result, Southern Water can ensure consistent cyber security across all services, in line with security regulations set by the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

    Sungard AS manages the data center facilities, providing 24/7 operational support and proactive monitoring for physical security, problem prevention and resilient, SLA-backed services.

    Faster service delivery, future-proof growth

    A web portal gives Southern Water visibility and control over the environment, where they can dynamically change services and provision new resources during peak times for consistent application performance throughout the year. They can flexibly apply computing resources wherever they are required and automate service operations across the company.

    “The new cloud environment enables Southern Water to present a service catalog back to the business that allows services to be spun up almost instantaneously, with just a click,” Nolan says. “They can reduce the number of people needed from an IT operations perspective and have far more agile, fast and consistently secure service operations.”

    “What once took many weeks to deploy now takes just seconds,” he continues. “It massively speeds up their development cycles so they can release new services to market much sooner. It’s a great foundation that can take them into the future.”

    Sungard AS will streamline that path. “With Sungard AS data centers, Southern Water can move forward knowing their growth won’t be restricted by physical location or concerns about resilience,” confirms Nolan. “They can continue this pace of change, knowing they can scale capacity and expand services with ease.”

    Bringing best practices approaches to utilities

    With more than 20 years’ experience serving the public sector market, MTI joined the Sungard AS Alliance partner program in 2018. In the future, Nolan sees the two companies working closely to bring best practice IT solutions to other utilities facing challenges similar to those of Southern Water.

    “Sungard AS brought a flexible, customer-centric, can-do attitude into the engagement that was really refreshing,” Nolan says. “This was no ‘drive-by’ sale. Sungard AS built a genuine, deep, long-term partnership that worked extremely well both for us and for Southern Water.”

    The timelines were challenging, but because of the partnership between MTI and Sungard AS, and our ability to be agile with regard to contractual and commercial arrangements, we met Southern Water’s very tight, very demanding deadline.
     
    Chief Technology Officer, MTI Technology

    logo-mti-southern-water-case-study-200x100

    When Southern Water—one of England’s largest water authorities—needed a more resilient IT infrastructure, they turned to MTI and Sungard AS. Now, they can continue to ensure water and wastewater gets where it needs to go, while moving IT transformation initiatives forward to deploy new IT services quickly, consistently and securely.

    Solutions

    • Colocation Services in two fully redundant Sungard AS data centers
    • Hosted Private Cloud for dedicated computing in a cloud environment
    • A hyperconverged Dell EMC VxRail infrastructure
    • Synchronous, bi-directional replication for higher resilience
    • Dell EMC Data Domain for backup and restoration
    • Security services by Trend Micro and Palo Alto Networks

    Results

    • Increased resilience for business operations and customer services
    • Ready to meet Water Services Regulation Authority (Ofwat), National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) and National Institute
      of Standards and Technology (NIST) regulations
    • Faster, consistent, and more secure service deployments
    • Easier transition to the cloud to advance transformation initiatives

    About the Company

    MTI is a technology services and solutions provider with operations across the UK, France and Germany. Its unique combination of IT transformation and cybersecurity expertise helps thousands of organizations leverage the latest technologies to modernize their IT operations, reduce operating costs and increase agility, while mitigating risk. Named Computer Reseller News’ 2019 Security VAR of the Year, MTI is a Sungard AS partner and one of only two Dell EMC Titanium partners in the UK.

    Sungard AS brought a flexible, customer-centric, can-do attitude into the engagement that was really refreshing. This was no ‘drive-by’ sale. Instead, Sungard AS built a genuine, deep, long-term partnership that worked extremely well for us and really well for Southern Water.”

    Chief Technology Officer,  MTI Technology

    Meeting regulations, increasing resilience

    When you’re charged with delivering water to 2.5 million customers a day and moving wastewater through 39,594 km of sewers, it takes more than just pipes to meet demands. It takes a resilient IT infrastructure.

    Southern Water’s service area spans East and West Sussex, Hampshire, Kent and the Isle of Wight, so meeting the needs of its customer base is daunting enough. But as a UK utility, Southern Water must meet Ofwat requirements, the Water Services Regulation Authority that oversees privatized companies in this sector—from monitoring their financial health to measuring how effectively they deliver services and interact with customers.

    Key to delivering those services is the IT environment supporting nearly 4,500 telemetry boxes as they monitor water flow 24/7 across Southern Water’s service area. Since the boxes transmit data about leaks or other abnormalities that could affect both the delivery and quality of water supplied, the IT infrastructure behind them must be highly resilient. If a consumer calls to report a leak or other incident, Southern Water also has a regulatory obligation to process those cases extremely quickly, so the systems that support call center operations must be highly available. To meet the strict standards of security regulators, customer data housed in those systems needs the highest level of protection.

    Lee Nolan, Chief Technology Officer at MTI, says increasing resilience and data protection were critical components of the utility’s IT transformation initiatives. “Southern Water has already digitised a lot of their customer services. So, from an IT perspective, their goal was to improve resilience and security, while continuing to automate operations wherever possible.”

    Demands exceed data center capacity

    However, putting its transformation plans into action would tax the aging systems in two existing data centers, owned by an external service provider. This was the perfect opportunity for MTI, Sungard AS and Dell Technologies to join forces and step up to transform Southern Water’s IT environment.

    “We provided an ecosystem of partners who each brought the best skills to bear as a group, making a very compelling reason for Southern Water to select us,” says Nolan. “Sungard AS is the world’s leading DR resilience partner from a facilities perspective, and Dell Technologies leads in the technology space. As prime contractor, MTI could bring the infrastructure and security together, then deploy and deliver the architecture in the way that would give Southern Water what they needed.”

    The project was awarded in October 2018, and the team worked to implement the new environment by the end of March 2019—when Southern Water’s contract with its former vendor expired.

    MTI and Dell Technologies designed and configured the private cloud infrastructure, a hyper-converged VxRail architecture that integrates compute, network, storage and virtualization resources to accelerate scalability and data center modernization.

    Sungard AS colocation services include hardened, enterprise-class data center facilities with the heating, cooling, power, network connectivity and redundancy required for always-on operations.

    To maximize resilience, Sungard AS installed the hardware infrastructure in two geographically separated data center facilities—London and Hounslow. Critical applications are split between the locations, including those supporting telemetry and call center operations, as well as SAP, Microsoft Exchange and Oracle solutions. Sungard AS cloud transformation consultants helped Southern Water’s internal team migrate workloads.

    A Dell Technologies data deduplication storage system backs up data, while synchronous, bi-directional replication between the two data centers ensures data protection and faster recovery if a disruption occurs.

    The team worked hard to manage the pressures of a compressed schedule. “Because of the partnership between MTI and Sungard AS, and our ability to be agile with regard to contractual and commercial arrangements, we met Southern Water’s very tight, very demanding deadline,” says Nolan.

    Fortified security defenses

    MTI implemented multiple layers of security solutions from VMware, Trend Micro and Palo Alto Networks to protect sensitive data as it flows into, out of, and across the network. As a result, Southern Water can ensure consistent cyber security across all services, in line with security regulations set by the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

    Sungard AS manages the data center facilities, providing 24/7 operational support and proactive monitoring for physical security, problem prevention and resilient, SLA-backed services.

    Faster service delivery, future-proof growth

    A web portal gives Southern Water visibility and control over the environment, where they can dynamically change services and provision new resources during peak times for consistent application performance throughout the year. They can flexibly apply computing resources wherever they are required and automate service operations across the company.

    “The new cloud environment enables Southern Water to present a service catalog back to the business that allows services to be spun up almost instantaneously, with just a click,” Nolan says. “They can reduce the number of people needed from an IT operations perspective and have far more agile, fast and consistently secure service operations.”

    “What once took many weeks to deploy now takes just seconds,” he continues. “It massively speeds up their development cycles so they can release new services to market much sooner. It’s a great foundation that can take them into the future.”

    Sungard AS will streamline that path. “With Sungard AS data centers, Southern Water can move forward knowing their growth won’t be restricted by physical location or concerns about resilience,” confirms Nolan. “They can continue this pace of change, knowing they can scale capacity and expand services with ease.”

    Bringing best practices approaches to utilities

    With more than 20 years’ experience serving the public sector market, MTI joined the Sungard AS Alliance partner program in 2018. In the future, Nolan sees the two companies working closely to bring best practice IT solutions to other utilities facing challenges similar to those of Southern Water.

    “Sungard AS brought a flexible, customer-centric, can-do attitude into the engagement that was really refreshing,” Nolan says. “This was no ‘drive-by’ sale. Sungard AS built a genuine, deep, long-term partnership that worked extremely well both for us and for Southern Water.”

    The timelines were challenging, but because of the partnership between MTI and Sungard AS, and our ability to be agile with regard to contractual and commercial arrangements, we met Southern Water’s very tight, very demanding deadline.
     
    Chief Technology Officer, MTI Technology