SA Tourism completes 'lift and shift' of apps to Azure

The South Australia Tourism Commission (SATC) has coupled a migration to a new premises with a cloud migration, shifting the majority of its applications and systems over to Microsoft Azure.

Building on successful one-off uses of cloud-based solutions by the marketing team and tracking the 2017 BUPA Challenge cycling tour, SATC decided to pull the plug on its servers and network to save space and mitigate risk at its new offices.

“We already had some experience with Azure as our digital marketing team uses Azure already for Sitecore to manage our public and private websites, and there are the applications developed by Satalyst for the cycle tours,” SATC IT operations officer Sam Mountstephen said.

“Prior to moving we had two physical hosts with about 16 or 17 virtual machines. We had to do quite a bit of work to get to 12 VMs and virtualise SQL, SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, Applications Server, Microsoft Systems Server and Config Manager.”

Mountstephen said the migration was completed with no loss of data or downtime, where despite the shutdown of the head office staff were able to remotely access work “as though nothing had happened”.

IT manager Michelle Stokes added that it also gave the commission to refresh and consolidate its disparate systems and platforms used across the state.

Stokes said that the numerous events run by the commission were backed by six different systems which regularly left staff confused.

Now the commission can spin up and build platforms on Power Apps.

Mountstephen added that the stability of the new cloud-based functions is a marked improvement compared to the commission’s previous environment.

It’s also a springboard for the commission to increase its adoption of Office 365 before eventually tacking on other planning and management suites.

“We use CRM and would like to migrate to Dynamics 365 to take benefit of internet-facing updated portals,” Mountstephen said.

Following that, the commission will then look at migrating SharePoint to Azure as well.

“We’re also hoping we can use artificial intelligence for image and video recognition across our marketing content imagery for smart searching and video tagging,” Mountstephen added.