Organization Description

This accredited educational organization’s goals are to immerse students, teachers, and Course Leaders into learning environments across the globe. This is the core mission of the educational programs provided by this organization and why they are recognized as the world's leader in the educational travel industry.

Problem

When an educational organization decided to acquire similar companies, they were met with the challenge of integrating and combining disparate systems and data. The organization was attempting to facilitate this merging of systems without a dedicated database management team, which left them overwhelmed by the influx of IT projects brought on by the acquisitions. 

The organization relied heavily on multiple database systems to manage the entire educational experience, including first contact, planning, and detailed scheduling of a trip to include transportation, lodging, food, and excursions. So, any system outages or database issues that could prevent the client from booking their services would cost them lost business.

Once the educational organization recognized how critical the seamless integration of the acquired data would be for business continuity, they hired Solvaria to help manage their database environment.

Solution

Solvaria first implemented our 24x7x365 support (MMT365) for the multiple Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) in the educational organization’s environment. Our routine monitoring, maintenance, and troubleshooting combined with the design and implementation of more robust high-availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) solutions were able to reduce the number and duration of critical system outages, ensuring more reliable business continuity.

To implement HA and DR in the organization, Solvaria gathered business requirements related to system availability and recoverability. Based on the business requirements, Solvaria designed a technical solution to meet data availability requirements and recoverability of the business. Solvaria implemented:

• Always-on high availability groups for SQL
• Made sure SQL Server VMs maintained separate hosts
• Geo-separated the availability group for their SQL environment at a remote data center

Results 

Solvaria assisted the educational organization in determining how to best handle the acquisition’s data so the IT team could transition from problem-solving to strategic thinking. The company has continued to partner with Solvaria for its ongoing database support and maintenance, upgrades, and strategic IT projects. Over the years, Solvaria has also assisted the organization with the support of multiple database platforms, data architecture, process improvements, and data cleansing. This allowed the company’s IT team to focus on business goals and day-to-day processes without concerns of database performance or security issues.