Umgeni Water, the KwaZulu-Natal water authority, has upgraded its ageing computer infrastructure and network at its Pietermaritzburg head office.
The R 4-million upgrade was designed in conjunction with Kwa-Zulu-Natal networking company, DNS Networking (KZN), in a bid to introduce new technologies to the Umgeni system as part of a plan to meet administrative and productivity demands over the next five years.
The move was also designed to introduce fail-safe and back-up systems into the Umgeni network, which serves more than 500 users at the authority`s head-office and a further 360 at 23 remote sites.
Umgeni Water`s acting IS manager, Daniel Masson, says the need for 100% uptime was a key motivating factor behind the upgrade: "Umgeni is primarily a bulk water supplier to three million customers in Pietermaritzburg and greater Durban areas.
"It is therefore critical that we offer extensive services to municipalities, TLCs, regional councils and rural water communites," he says.
"Many mission-critical applications run on the network, including reticulation, financial, billing and human resource systems. Chaos would result should they go down for any length of time."
In all, more than 50 business applicatons operate across the Umgeni Water computer network, including office automation, e-mail, access control and technical systems.
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