ROYAL LEPAGE

By leveraging the cloud to deliver hyper availability, HostedBizz solved network outages and improved IT system reliability by architecting a resilient, redundant and fully managed cloud and network infrastructure.

Royal LePage Performance and Team Realty operate more than 20 sales offices in the National Capital and surrounding region. Supporting in excess of 1200 real estate agents and 80 staff members, the two brokerages represent a substantial percentage of the overall residential home and condo sales in the Ottawa market.

The executive leadership requires that the entire IT operation delivers hyper availability to its agents and staff to ensure that there is no interruption with the high volume of real estate transactions that occur on a daily basis including; listings, sales, contract processing, commission distributions and general operations.

The brokerages were encountering a number of challenges related to network and IT systems reliability. The existing wide area network was experiencing regular outages as well as unacceptable speed, performance levels and security vulnerabilities. In addition, the IT systems and data backup that were hosted on premise lacked performance, sufficient redundancy and required best practice backup implementation in line with the businesses RTO and RPO objectives. To address these issues and support the ongoing growth of the business there was an immediate requirement to re-architect the entire network and IT systems. This included a secure wide area network with high speed access, system redundancy at all levels and the provisioning of full IT disaster recovery and business continuity to ensure the standards of service delivery set by management were met. Finally, the brokerages required that this be delivered as a fully monitored and managed service.

To understand and address the needs of the business, the executive management engaged HostedBizz to undertake a full assessment of the network and IT systems at head office as well as across all sales office locations. This process involved several meetings with executives as well as an IT committee that represented the needs of the agent and staff community. The outcome of this resulted in HostedBizz providing an audit report of its findings along with recommendations to address the performance and reliability concerns as well the future needs of the business.

Based on the report, HostedBizz was engaged to implement all of the recommendations which began with an entire overhaul of the wide area network. This included architecting an entirely new managed WAN and installing private MPLS network access at each office location. New layer 2 switching was provided along with redundant network access using disparate carriers configured with automatic fail-over at the larger office locations. In addition, enhanced security was delivered using the centrally managed HostedBizz Clean Internet services eliminating the need for individual firewalls at each office location. This also allowed for centrally monitored and managed wireless access points and unified threat management on the WAN. The new network improved up time to 99.999%, significantly reduced security vulnerabilities and delivered
material performance gains.

Once the new WAN was in place, HostedBizz began architecting the IT systems to support the entire business operation including sales, finance and telecommunications. Based on the audit & assessment findings, it was determined by Royal LePage that migrating all IT systems to the HostedBizz cloud was the right approach. Leveraging the fully managed enterprise grade cloud computing infrastructure provided the level of redundancy and scalability that executive was seeking. All systems were migrated to the cloud and configured with Veeam managed backup. Backup policies were set in line with the RTO and RPO objectives established for each IT service and ranked by criticality.

The resiliency and redundancy of the new solution has delivered performance improvements and up-times that have exceeded the customer’s expectations. In addition, Royal LePage and its leadership team has the reassurance that their systems are actively monitored and managed, their data is safe and recoverable in the event of data loss or disaster and, they no longer deal with the burden of managing IT infrastructure.