NSW Trade & Investment sends DR to AWS

NSW’s Department of Trade and Investment has wrapped up a five year IT infrastructure deal that gives the agency the opportunity to close down one of its internally run data centres.

It will pay solutions provider ASG Group $4.9 million over the next three and a half years to transition its disaster recovery and test and development environment into the Amazon Web Services public cloud.

The move will allow the agency to decommission one of its facilities in Orange or Maitland..

Remaining legacy DR and test and development needs - which the department has chosen not to shift to AWS - will be moved into a fully managed environment within one of the NSW Government’s GovDC facilities in Silverwater and Unanderra, which will also be delivered by ASG.

According a contract notice, ASG will provide a managed service up to the operating system layer for the agency.

The new partnership will also see Trade and Investment adopt the ‘Boomerang’ tool set for automatically migrating virtual machines to AWS.

The department went to market for the services in March last year, kicking off the latest stage of a multi-year infrastructure overhaul that has already seen it consolidate numerous legacy computing sites across the state into the Orange and Maitland data centres.

The next phase aims to achieve what it calls its ‘hybrid cloud model’, referring to the split between the public cloud and the GovDC facilities.

The agency cemented its position at the forefront of public sector cloud experimentation when it elected to replace an ad-hoc bunch of disparate ERP solutions accumulated over many years of government restructures with SAP’s cloud-based Business ByDesign suite, hosted from SAP’s German data centres.

It recently lost its key cloud advocate after chief information officer David Kennedy departed the NSW public service late last year to take up a new role with State Super Financial Services.