Services Australia is setting up its own ‘cloud guild’ in a bid to accelerate the shift to as-a-service infrastructure and platforms.
iTnews can reveal the ‘Cloud Centre of Excellence’ (Cloud CoE) is in the early stages of development following the appointment of Defence executive Deepak Vangani as director this month.
A Cloud CoE centralises the various aspects necessary for driving a cloud-enabled transformation, according to Gartner.
Services Australia has more than 4500 staff and contractors working in its technology services group, making the agency the federal government’s largest IT shop.
While details remain sparse, a spokesperson said “the purpose of the Cloud CoE will be to enable cloud transformation across the agency".
“Services Australia is continuously looking for ways to enhance our cloud enablement capabilities,” the spokesperson told iTnews.
“As part of this, the Cloud Centre of Excellence (CoE) was recently endorsed and is in the early stages of the discovery process.”
Similar ‘guilds’, or internal ‘academies’ have sprung up across some of Australia’s largest companies in the past several years, including at NAB, Telstra, Kmart, IAG, PEXA, and, most recently, Qantas.
But unlike these mostly Amazon Web Services-aligned guilds, Services Australia's Cloud CoE is not expected align with any specific platform and will look at "all types of cloud".
Services Australia currently employs a range of cloud services, including an OpenStack private cloud that sits across x86 and IBM Power Systems hardware.
At least part of the country’s immunisation register known as AIR was recently shifted onto the private cloud to withstand a 30-fold increase in demand as a result of the current Covid-19 vaccination drive.
Plans for the Cloud CoE come just weeks after Services Australia created a training group, called the Services Academy, for staff and contractors to upskill in Pega automation software.
The academy offers training programs, reference materials and service desks to to “maximise knowledge development” for Pega-based projects.
