Cork City Council

Background

Cork City Council is a local authority that provides a range of services to the city’s 123,000 residents. These include housing, roads, transport, planning, environmental and leisure services.

In the course of providing those services efficiently and effectively, the council has built a portfolio of 20 websites that are used by those living in, working in or visiting Cork. Members of the public rely on the websites for key information, services and transactions, so it is important that they remain available to access even during particularly busy periods.

Tibus was tasked with providing a fully managed secure hosting service, including technical support, with guaranteed uptime of 99.98% for the main corkcity.ie website and the council’s other websites.

What We Did

Tibus designed and built a completely private and fully managed cloud infrastructure, including an individual dedicated virtual server for each of the 20 websites, that can scale up or down depending on Cork City Council’s requirements. 

All of the servers are hosted in one of our purpose-built, secure data centre facilities in accordance with ISO 27001 standards.

We handled the migration to the new infrastructure and are taking care of hardware and software management, data backups and restorations, and security for the council on an ongoing basis.

We also provide a 24/7 monitoring and alerting service so that potential issues are identified and managed promptly.

A nightly backup is created locally at the data centre, while a secondary backup is created at an off-site location in another data centre so the council staff have complete peace of mind.

Result

The hosting architecture we have put in place delivers server optimisation, scalability, flexibility, speed of deployment, security and high availability for Cork City Council. The 99.999% availability provided exceeds the council’s specification.

The council can depend on the servers to handle high volume traffic at peak periods, which means that residents can access the information and services they need even in busy or emergency situations.

Regular off-site backups provide the council with a clear and speedy disaster recovery strategy and help to mitigate the potential cost of cyberattacks.