Helping You With The Challenges You Face

What kind of challenges do you face as a CIO, CTO or IT Manager and how can Mandalay’s waste facility management software help you overcome these challenges?

Data Accessibility

One key challenge is the timely access to data and information from remote sites by a centralised administrative function. In the waste industry, this can involve USBs and tablet devices being moved from facilities to council offices for data to be uploaded manually. This can be time consuming and unnecessary when technology is available to automate and streamline this process. 

Data where and when you need it in near real-time 

Data Synchronisation 

DataSync is a data synchronisation technology designed and developed by Mandalay. This technology replaces SQL Replication and has been designed as a two-way synchronisation system between two databases to enable facility data to be synchronised to a central database. 

Data Sync is a locally running Windows service installed on every machine that runs the facility database. This service sends and receives data securely using Azure Service bus over HTTPS with TLS1.2. Council’s network will be required to permit public HTTPS (port 443) traffic for this service to specific endpoints via firewall or web proxy – detailed in the supplied IT Deployment Checklist.

Hybrid Cloud Computing 

Our hybrid solution provides access to centralised administrative capabilities via a cloud-based remote application service. Due to the design and nature of our hybrid solution, sites can continue to function as normal in an offline capacity during any period of network or cloud-based outage and automatically synchronise when back online. The centralised data automatically updates to and from each site and gracefully recovers from outages. 

Data Security  

For any organisation, the security and safety of their data is very important. Ensuring that the information is available, protected, and safe from disaster is a challenge that requires substantial commitment from an organisation in both skills and systems. Moving to a cloud-based offering effectively out-sources that requirement and corresponding risk to a third-party. This requires a significant commitment to maintain and exceed the requirements that your organisation may have. By leveraging both the systems afforded by new cloud-based technologies and having a dedicated focus to continually improve the data security capabilities of our operations, your organisation will benefit as we strive to achieve accreditation for information security in cloud-based computing.

Keeping Your Data Secure 

Data Encryption  

All customer databases hosted in Microsoft Azure have transparent data encryption (TDE) enabled to ensure data is kept encrypted at rest. All data communication from site to cloud is managed by DataSync which uses SSL connections to send data messages. All storage accounts (used for customer data transfer / uploads) are configured with encryption for data at rest. All our web-based APIs and application gateways are secured using SSL. We use Octopus Deploy with a polling-based model which only connects securely using an encrypted TLS connection. 

Data Storage

All production data is stored within Australian data centres located in Sydney and Melbourne (Microsoft Azure). Production data can be fully anonymised after permission is obtained from the customer, before being stored on non-production systems. Operational data of a non-sensitive (i.e. analytical) nature is stored in third-party services (including Microsoft Azure in Singapore, Launch Darkly in AWS US, and Raygun in AWS US-East).  

Microsoft Azure is considered a Tier-4 data centre from a physical perspective – but our usage of PaaS and IaaS is in a Tier III configuration (i.e. redundant capacity, power, and multiple uplinks). 

Operational Security 

There are many aspects of security that a CIO must be across including assurance that day to day operations remain functional and secure. There is always a risk that any maintenance, updates or network outages will halt or negatively impact operations. This should always be avoided or minimised wherever possible. 

Keeping Your Operations Secure 

Administrative Auditing 

We are moving to an Azure Active Directory centric approach with administrative auditing that encompasses all our cloud systems. In combination with Azure Privileged Identity Management and Azure Sentinel, rigorous access control practices and monitoring are provided. 

Security Patch Testing 

We run multiple infrastructures for production, staging, testing and development. Application-level patches (including security) must progress throughout each environment. We also have a managed WSUS infrastructure to coordinate the rollout of Windows Updates.

A Centralised Log Server 

Our production infrastructure has a centralised log server and monitoring which provides operational overview of all cloud-based systems. We also gather remote diagnostics from site-based PCs. Our production data replication writes all data (including security and audit trails) to a centralised write-only audit table in Microsoft Azure.

Response and Management Platform 

As part of our waste facility management software production support, we have an incident response and management platform complete with documented incident escalation workflows. 

Our current procedure for business continuity heavily leverages standard Microsoft Azure functionality, including redundancy via SQL Azure DBs and leveraging Azure PaaS offerings. In the case of disaster, most of our systems can be automatically re-deployed via our configuration management tool and our infrastructure automatically reprovisioned

Deployment of Upgrades 

Keeping your facility software updated and upgraded is a must to maintain smooth operations and to ensure your facility has access to the latest technology. But how can an IT team make sure that every instance is up to date? Staying on top of the latest updates and upgrades needed can be time consuming and overwhelming, leaving upgrades to be put off and sometimes forgotten.  

Always Up to Date Software  

Octopus Deploy 

Octopus Deploy is a deployment and package management system used to handle release management, including installation and upgrades of systems both in the cloud and at customer facilities.  This is achieved by installing an Octopus Tentacle at each facility PC running our software.  The Tentacle is in the form of a Windows service and is only required to run at the time of installation and upgrade. 

This Windows service sends and receives data using an outbound-only SSL connection over HTTPS and requires access to a single endpoint (on port 443) via firewall or web proxy. Council’s network will be required to enable endpoints on port 443 detailed in the IT Deployment Checklist. 

The tentacle reads data from the deployment server and “pulls” information from the server to the facility, meaning that no inbound firewall or direct connections need to be opened at the facility. This means our waste facility management software ensures the facility remains in full control of local operations.

Additional Resources