Town of Gawler

The council

The Town of Gawler is one of South Australia's oldest municipalities, serving a growing community in Adelaide's northern corridor. The council operates from its civic centre and administration building in Gawler, and provides public services including free Wi-Fi along Murray Street (the main street), the Gawler Civic Centre and the town library.

As part of a broader Smart City strategy, the council needed a modern infrastructure platform to support its transition to cloud-based systems, improve resilience, and provide the internet capacity required for both corporate operations and public-facing services.

The problem

The Town of Gawler's existing infrastructure had two significant weaknesses — both of which created risk for an organisation that provides essential services to the community.

A single NBN connection for everything

The council's entire internet service ran through a single NBN connection at the head office. Every corporate system that needed internet access, every cloud service, and the public Wi-Fi network serving Murray Street, the Civic Centre and the library — all of it depended on one consumer-grade connection. There was no redundancy and no dedicated capacity for critical services. If the NBN went down, the council's internet-dependent operations went with it.

For an organisation pursuing a cloud-first strategy — moving services out of on-premise servers and into cloud platforms — the single NBN connection was a bottleneck and a single point of failure that needed solving before the strategy could progress.

DR infrastructure in a depot

The council's disaster recovery server infrastructure was housed at a separate depot site — a facility that was due for decommissioning. The depot wasn't designed to be a data centre. It lacked the power redundancy, physical security, environmental controls and compliance posture that council IT infrastructure should sit in. The DR equipment needed a new home — somewhere purpose-built, professionally managed, and connected to the council's network with high-speed, private connectivity.

Security requirements

As a local government organisation, the council is a potential target for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The existing NBN connection had no DDoS protection — a sustained attack could take the council's public-facing and internal services offline. Any new internet platform needed always-on DDoS mitigation built in.

What we did

Caznet was selected through a competitive public tender process to deliver the council's new connectivity and infrastructure platform.

20 km dark fibre to the data centre

Caznet deployed a dual-core dark fibre link spanning approximately 20 kilometres from the Town of Gawler council offices to Your DC, a purpose-built data centre in Edinburgh Parks.

Dark fibre is a dedicated, unlit fibre optic cable pair that the council and Caznet light with their own equipment — meaning the council has exclusive use of the link with no shared capacity, no contention, and the ability to scale bandwidth by changing the optics at each end rather than laying new cable. The dual-core design provides a built-in spare path for redundancy.

Over this fibre, two distinct services were provisioned:

• 10 Gbps private link to the data centre — giving the council high-speed, low-latency access to its co-located DR and production infrastructure, entirely separate from the public internet
• 500 Mbps internet service (scalable to 1 Gbps) — a dedicated, high-capacity internet connection replacing the single NBN, with room to grow as demand increases

Data centre co-location at Your DC

The council's DR server infrastructure was relocated from the ageing depot into co-location space at Your DC in Edinburgh Parks. The data centre provides enterprise-grade power redundancy, physical security, environmental monitoring and compliance — everything the depot lacked.

Because the data centre is connected directly to the council offices via the dark fibre, access to the co-located systems is effectively the same as having them on-site — but with the resilience, security and professional management of a purpose-built facility. There's no reliance on the public internet to reach the council's own infrastructure.

DDoS-protected internet

The 500 Mbps internet service was deployed with always-on DDoS protection including full traffic scrubbing. Malicious traffic is detected and filtered automatically before it reaches the council's network — without affecting legitimate traffic and without requiring manual intervention during an attack.

Segmented network for corporate and public services

The internet service was designed with a segmented network architecture, separating the council's corporate systems from the public Wi-Fi network. The free Wi-Fi on Murray Street, the Civic Centre and the library runs over the same high-speed internet platform, but on isolated VLANs — ensuring public traffic can't access internal council systems and that public usage doesn't starve corporate services of bandwidth.

The result

The Town of Gawler now operates on an infrastructure platform that supports its Smart City ambitions and positions the council well for future growth.

• 20 km dark fibre backbone — Dedicated, dual-core fibre providing a 10 Gbps private data centre link and a 500 Mbps (scalable to 1 Gbps) internet service, replacing a single NBN connection
• DR infrastructure in a real data centre — Relocated from a depot due for decommissioning to a purpose-built, professionally managed facility at Your DC, connected via private fibre
• DDoS protection — Always-on traffic scrubbing protecting the council's public-facing and internal services from attack
• Public Wi-Fi on enterprise infrastructure — Murray Street, the Civic Centre and library Wi-Fi all served over the same high-speed platform, securely segmented from corporate traffic
• Scalable foundation — The dark fibre and data centre platform can scale to higher bandwidth, additional services and future Smart City requirements without new physical infrastructure
• One provider — Fibre, internet, DDoS protection and data centre co-location delivered and managed by Caznet as a single, integrated platform