Mary MacKillop College

The college

Mary MacKillop College is a Catholic girls' school in Kensington, Adelaide, offering Years 7 to 12. The college is owned and governed by the Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart — the order co-founded by Mary MacKillop in 1866 — and has roots in Catholic education in the Kensington district stretching back to 1872.

The college serves approximately 400 students and 60 staff from a single campus on High Street. Like most modern schools, teaching and learning are deeply dependent on technology — from the SEQTA learning management system that students and teachers use daily, to file servers, Active Directory, and internet-based platforms that underpin the school's operations.

The problem

Caznet was engaged during the COVID pandemic, when the college's existing infrastructure was exposed by a series of events that made one thing clear: a school that depends on technology can't have all of that technology in a single room on a single campus.

Extended power outages

The college experienced multiple extended power outages caused by storms in a relatively short period. One outage lasted more than a day and a half of school time. Others knocked out power for at least half a school day each.

Every server the college depended on — Active Directory, file storage, the SEQTA learning management system, firewalls — was hosted in an on-premises server room on campus. When the power went out, all of it went offline. Students lost access to learning materials and internet-based platforms. Staff couldn't access systems or communicate with parents. The school couldn't send notifications, manage attendance, or coordinate with families. With 400 students on campus and no functioning digital infrastructure, learning effectively stopped.

This was made worse by the timing. During COVID, remote learning capability wasn't a nice-to-have — it was essential. A school that couldn't guarantee access to its own systems during a power outage was a school that couldn't guarantee continuity of education.

An unsupported phone system

The college's phone system was a traditional PABX that had been converted to SIP — but the conversion hadn't gone well. The system was unreliable, lacked even basic functionality (it didn't have hold music, and no one could log in to configure it), and had no vendor support. When something went wrong, there was nobody to call. For a school that relies on phones to communicate with parents, coordinate with emergency services, and manage day-to-day administration, an unsupported phone system was a significant risk.

Outgrown internet

The campus internet was a 400 Mbps TPG fibre connection. While adequate at the time it was installed, the college's bandwidth demands had grown — more cloud-based learning tools, more devices, more video — and the connection didn't provide the capacity or the data centre connectivity the school needed for its next step.

What we did

10 km dark fibre to the data centre

Caznet deployed a 10 Gbps dark fibre link spanning approximately 10 kilometres between the Kensington campus and Caznet's Adelaide data centre. Over this fibre, two services were provisioned:

• Dedicated private connectivity to the college's own rack space in the data centre — giving the campus high-speed, low-latency access to its servers as if they were still on-site
• 1 Gbps fibre internet — replacing the 400 Mbps TPG connection with more than double the capacity and room to scale further

A backup NBN Business Internet connection was also deployed at the campus for automatic failover if the primary fibre link is ever interrupted.

Every server moved to the data centre

This was the most important change. All on-premises servers were migrated out of the campus server room and into the college's own rack space in the data centre — Active Directory, file servers, the SEQTA learning management system, firewalls, everything.

The data centre provides enterprise-grade power redundancy (dual feeds, generators, UPS), physical security and environmental controls — the kind of resilience a school server room simply cannot match.

The result: even if the campus loses power entirely, the college's systems stay online. Students and staff working from home — or from any location with internet access — can continue to access SEQTA, files, email and every other system exactly as normal. A campus power outage is no longer an IT outage. Learning doesn't stop.

Hosted phone system — 40 handsets

The failing PABX-to-SIP conversion was removed entirely. Caznet deployed a hosted phone system with approximately 40 handsets across the campus.

The new system is cloud-hosted, properly supported, and provides the functionality the school needs — auto-attendant, call queues, hold music, voicemail-to-email, and the ability for Caznet to manage and update the system remotely. Because the phone system is hosted in the cloud (not on campus), it also continues to operate during a campus power outage — calls can be routed to mobiles or alternative numbers if the campus is unreachable.

The result

• Learning never stops — All servers are in the data centre. A campus power outage no longer takes systems offline. Students and staff can access SEQTA, files and every other system from home, exactly as they do during normal remote learning days.
• 10 Gbps dark fibre — Dedicated, high-speed connectivity between campus and data centre, with 1 Gbps internet and NBN backup
• Communications restored — A functioning, supported phone system replacing an unsupported PABX conversion that had no hold music, no vendor access, and no way to fix problems
• COVID-resilient — The migration was delivered during the pandemic, at a time when guaranteeing remote learning continuity wasn't optional. The infrastructure now supports seamless transitions between on-campus and remote learning.
• Parent communication maintained — During power outages, the school can still communicate with parents via the hosted phone system and cloud-based platforms, rather than going silent

The power outages that originally exposed the problem haven't stopped — storms still hit Adelaide. But when the power goes out at Kensington now, the college's systems stay up, students keep learning, and staff keep communicating. The infrastructure is no longer on campus — it's in a data centre that doesn't lose power.