Replacing End-of-Life Servers Before They Took the City Down
The Challenge
The city's core systems — utility billing, public records, and permit management — ran on on-premise servers that were 8–10 years old and no longer supported by the vendor. Backups ran nightly but had never been tested for restore. There was no documented disaster recovery plan, no RTO or RPO targets, and no offsite copy of critical data. A single hardware failure would have meant days of downtime for public services.
What We Did
- 1
Conducted a full infrastructure assessment: hardware age, vendor support status, failure indicators, and current backup configuration
- 2
Identified two servers at critical risk — past end-of-life with no replacement path — and prioritized them for immediate action
- 3
Designed a hybrid architecture: new on-premise hardware for latency-sensitive workloads paired with Azure for backup, DR, and archival storage
- 4
Executed a phased migration with a maintenance window of under four hours of planned downtime
- 5
Configured and documented a disaster recovery plan with defined RTO (4 hours) and RPO (24 hours) targets
- 6
Validated the restore process with a live drill — restoring the full environment from backup in under three hours
- 7
Enrolled all systems in NavTech Managed Operations for ongoing monitoring, patch management, and alerting
Outcomes
- Zero unplanned downtime in the 12 months following go-live
- Documented DR plan with tested restore — first in the city's history
- 38% reduction in infrastructure operating costs year-over-year
- All critical systems on vendor-supported hardware with proactive lifecycle management
- Monthly monitoring reports delivered to city administration
Services Involved
Abilene · San Angelo · Sweetwater · Brownwood · Breckenridge · Big Spring · and surrounding communities
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