Horizon Power shifts workloads into private cloud

Western Australia’s Horizon Power has completed a six-month migration of an undisclosed number of workloads out of on-premises data centres to a private cloud environment.

The regional energy provider signed a deal with Macquarie Telecom and the telco’s cloud services unit in August last year, and the migration work was completed last month.

The rehosting of some operational technology and industrial control systems is understood to have been within the scope of the project.

In a statement, Horizon Power’s senior manager for technology Jeff Campbell said the move was partially spurred by the state’s commitment to cut carbon emissions by 2030.

“To achieve the target, we are looking at how to build more digital and IoT-related services and remove the cost and complexity of managing servers, server clusters, storage devices and backup processes,” Campbell said.

“This will ultimately allow us to reduce our data centre footprint and corresponding energy consumption.”

Campbell said he also anticipated “efficiency” improvements from the private cloud arrangement, which included “supporting the rapid deployment of applications”.

Macquarie Telecom WA state manager Aaron Tighe added that the cloud transition “is helping Horizon Power leverage automation, data and condition-based monitoring to bring cleaner services to customers.”