Service NSW goes 100 percent AWS for digital products

Service NSW has moved the last of its workloads out of the state government’s data centre and is now operating all digital products 100 percent in the public cloud.

The one-stop shop for NSW government services began operating its digital products entirely on Amazon Web Services last month.

It comes amid a wider push to make public cloud the default setting across the public sector in line with the government’s latest cloud policy.

Channel enablement director Suneetha Bodduluri revealed Service NSW had reached the milestone last month, more than three years after the agency pushed its first workloads into AWS.

“Two years ago, when I joined Service NSW, they were in a hybrid model – 50/50 data centre and the cloud,” she said during a panel session at the 2021 digital.nsw showcase.

“As of this week, we switched off pretty much every single instance in [our] data centre. We are 100 percent cloud now.”

A spokesperson confirmed to iTnews that all digital products such as the COVID-Safe check-in tool available through the Service NSW app were now operating 100 percent on AWS.

Other products include Dine & Discover, the government’s Covd-19 recovery voucher scheme, and business grants.

“This will improve the availability of core services to customers, while also enabling Service NSW to adopt industry best security practices to protect data and systems,” the spokesperson said.

Service NSW pushed its first production workloads into AWS for the government’s Toll Relief Program, which was introduced back in July 2018.

Since then, it has been busy shifting as many of its on-premises workloads to the cloud as possible under a multi-year migration project.

Bodduluri said the “entire team was really happy” since the move to the cloud, particularly the auto-scaling that resulted in more resilient and available systems.

With the pandemic and public health orders mandating QR code check-ins at shops and hospitality venues, she said demand for Service NSW services has “grown up to 85 percent”.  

“If I look at the number of customers using our mobile app prior to Covid, probably in a day I’d see 100,000 check-ins, but now I’m seeing 12 to 14 million check-ins a day,” Bodduluri added.

Under the government’s cloud policy, which came into effect last October, all agencies are now required to “make use of public cloud services as the default”.

GovDC and other protected-level private clouds through the recently established protective security policy framework zone three colocation services panel are only expected to be used by “exception”.

A minimum 25 percent of ICT services are anticipated to be public cloud-based by 2023, up from the currently 17 percent.

The government expects that 95 percent of major IT infrastructure investment will be born in the public cloud in future, with less than five percent to require exemptions from the cloud policy.

AWS is used alongside a number of other cloud services at Service NSW, including Salesforce and Microsoft 365.