How local councils implement cloud in a merger

When entities merge together there are many factors to consider including how to merge each organisation’s cloud and on-premise security.

Naren Gangavarapu, chief information and digital officer at Northern Beaches Council spoke to Digital Nation Australia on how the council adopted a cloud-first strategy with the merger of three councils.

He said the Northern Beaches Council is a merged organisation, which he said provides a good case of what happens with cloud and on-prem security when you merge two entities.

“It's a merger of three councils, which had heavily invested in on-premise applications and solutions for infrastructure, software, hardware, everything, since the amalgamation about six years ago,” he explained.

“We've started the journey to move towards a cloud-first principle. I’ve been here over two and a half years, and I've been put it on a fast track, to move a lot of the on-prem applications to the cloud. We use HR, information systems and payroll systems, time and rostering systems, we use SaaS and we merged a lot of on-prem systems into two providers.”

Northern Beaches Council uses SAP SuccessFactors for running its payroll and HR information management systems and UKG Kronos for time management and rostering.

Gangavarapu said, “They're both integrated, which provide a one-stop shop for employees to do all their businesses related to their HR activities, recruitment, payroll information, this provides a great employee experience.”

The council does have some platform-as-a-service solutions, according to Gangavarapu.

“We use Microsoft Azure as the platform as a service and what we tend to do is a lot of custom-built applications that we have inherited legacy applications.

"This cannot be immediately replaced; we are slowly moving them from on-prem infrastructure to platform-as-a-service and securing them there, so they are easy to access,” he said.