Centacare boosts cyber resilience & halves Azure bill

11:11 Systems has published a case study with Centacare Catholic Community Services detailing an overhaul of the charity's disaster recovery and backup environment, along with changes to reduce cloud storage costs.

Centacare is one of South Australia's larger providers of social and community support and has supported the community for more than 80 years. The case study describes how its IT team replaced end-of-support recovery hardware and added safeguards to reduce ransomware risk.

The project focused on Centacare's previous disaster recovery set-up, which had reached end-of-support. The environment also lacked air-gapping, increasing exposure to ransomware, and constraints on testing limited confidence in failover procedures during a major incident.

Legacy constraints

Disaster recovery systems often rely on a mix of on-premises equipment and cloud services. When hardware reaches end-of-support, operational risk rises: vendors may stop issuing security updates and replacement parts can be harder to source. For regulated or mission-led organisations, a prolonged outage can disrupt service delivery and damage trust.

Centacare's challenges extended beyond ageing equipment. Without air-gapping, backups and recovery systems sat too close to production, increasing the chance ransomware could spread across networks and encrypt primary data and backups. Limited isolated testing can also leave teams uncertain how systems will behave in real incident conditions.

Services deployed

Rather than a like-for-like hardware replacement, Centacare selected 11:11 Systems for a broader recovery and resilience program. The implementation included 11:11 Disaster Recovery as a Service for Zerto, 11:11 Cloud Backup for Veeam Cloud Connect, and 11:11 Object Storage for AWS.

Disaster Recovery as a Service typically places failover infrastructure in a provider environment and automates parts of replication and recovery. Veeam Cloud Connect is commonly used to move backup copies to an off-site repository. Object storage provides a separate storage layer for data, often using an S3-compatible interface for applications and backup tools.

The organisations described the result as an "air-gapped disaster recovery solution". Air-gapping isolates backup and recovery copies from production networks, reducing the likelihood attackers can reach or alter recovery data during a ransomware event.

Cost changes

The case study also reports a reduction in Centacare's cloud storage spend. According to the organisations, Centacare halved its Azure data storage costs after switching to 11:11's S3-compatible storage.

Those savings were linked to additional security measures. The organisations said Centacare reinvested the reduced storage costs into "enhanced, immutable backup storage capabilities". Immutability is designed to prevent data from being changed or deleted for a defined retention period, limiting the impact of attackers attempting to erase or encrypt backups.

Switching storage platforms can also have operational implications. IT teams may need to adjust monitoring, retention policies, and access controls. Organisations that rely on specific cloud-native features may face trade-offs when moving to an S3-compatible platform, depending on how applications and backup tools integrate.

Vendor selection

Centacare's ICT team described how it assessed suppliers during procurement, contrasting proposals that mirrored its existing approach with a plan that reworked the structure of disaster recovery and backup.

"Every other provider we spoke to started by asking what we were currently doing and then proposed a solution that replicated it. That might have fixed the hardware issue, but not the network or resilience problems," said Brenton Denney, manager of ICT services at Centacare Catholic Community Services. "Instead, 11:11 Systems began by asking a simple but powerful question: 'Why are you doing it this way?' No one else challenged our thinking like that, and it led to a broader conversation about doing it better, not just differently."

The case study reflects a broader focus among managed infrastructure providers on cyber recovery services, as organisations face more frequent ransomware attacks and higher expectations for business continuity. Many IT leaders now treat recoverability as a core security requirement alongside detection and prevention.

Centacare said it now has a modern disaster recovery and backup environment with greater separation between production systems and recovery copies, and expects the updated set-up to strengthen its ability to recover from a significant cyber incident.