Moreland City Council strikes private cloud deal

Victoria’s Moreland City Council has struck a four-year managed services contract that will see it upgrade network links and adopt a private cloud model in preparation for the National Broadband Network.

The council went to tender for IT network infrastructure managed services on June 29, in advance of the expiry of its five-year Optus contract this month.

Council documents indicate that Moreland City Council resolved to strike a four-year, $2.95 million contract with Melbourne-based ISP Australia Internet Solutions (AINS) in September.

The contract came with two one-year extension options; AINS this week estimated it to be worth a total of $5 million.

The City of Moreland covers an area of about 51 square kilometres, and is located between four and 10 kilometres north of the Melbourne city centre.

It operates an in-house, primary data centre in the Civic Centre and disaster recovery infrastructure in a third-party facility in Port Melbourne.

Moreland City Council’s wide area network extends to 23 council sites, including libraries and maternal and child health centres. Internet services are provided via the primary data centre.

The council in September noted that it was concerned over slow application performance at sites other than the Civic Centre, ageing security infrastructure and the availability of wireless infrastructure.

It hoped to adopt a private cloud solution so as to improve application availability, and modernise.

AINS said it would provide Moreland with “internal Local Area Network (LAN) infrastructure management, Wide Area Network (WAN) and Dark Fibre services as well as IaaS/SaaS/Private Cloud computing services”.

“A key component of the contracted solution was to allow for easy migration to the National Broadband Network (NBN) as and when the infrastructure becomes available,” it said.