A win at the AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards

Datacom is delighted to be this year’s Global Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) Public Sector Partner Award winner for the migration of the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA).

The AWS Global Public Sector Partner Awards recognise leaders in the channel playing a key role in helping customers drive innovation and build solutions using AWS cloud technology.

"We're excited to win this award, particularly alongside the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) who accelerated their digital transformation and recognised 60 per cent savings by migrating to AWS,” Datacom Australia Managing Director Alexandra Coates said.

DEECA brings together Victoria’s climate change, energy, environment, water, forests, planning, and emergency management functions into a single department to maximise connections between the environment, community, industry, and economy.

Early in 2020, DEECA wanted to strengthen the resiliency of its infrastructure and existing applications that formed part of the state’s critical emergency infrastructure.

Datacom looked at DEECA's strategy, supporting IT plan, and current state architecture and was able to demonstrate a 65 per cent reduction in cost to operate and create a self-funding project. Datacom established a cross-functional migration team working collaboratively across the project, including project management, cloud consultants, DevOps engineers, and developers.

“To provide expertise in designing highly reliable, available services using AWS, Datacom worked to assess the existing DEECA environment and recommended an approach, foundation, and governance model to accelerate DEECA’s desired outcomes. Together we have improved service availability for the department’s infrastructure and reduced the cost of services whilst doing so,” Joe Serra, DEECA Director, ICT Delivery Information Services, said.

AWS was selected as the provider of choice as it enabled DEECA to eliminate single-site dependencies. All AWS regional services have a minimum of three availability zones to provide a sound basis for multi-site disaster recovery capabilities.

The key AWS technologies used included infrastructure as code, which provides the ability to automate the creation of environments and develop a self-service vending model for infrastructure. The adoption of Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS) provided a multi-site database service capability that requires vastly reduced amounts of administrative overhead to manage and maintain, whilst providing automated recovery capabilities that can massively reduce the downtime of database services. 

Across DEECA, the following benefits are now being seen:

• 60 – 65 per cent demonstrated a reduction in cost to operate services, using platform as a service (PaaS) and modern information management services
• Multi-site disaster recovery capabilities improve service availability
• Oracle Database cost reductions (through the use of right sizing, right pricing, and cost optimisation)
• Automation through the use of infrastructure as code
• Data centre exit avenues across the whole department
• State-of-the-art underlying hardware available through a consumption model
• Zero-trust security — a more secure environment
• Improved remote access for users.

Datacom is an AWS Managed Service Partner and accredited Migration Competency Partner, with many years of experience in migrating workloads to AWS across Australia and New Zealand.

“Every year we are impressed by how our partners continue to innovate using cloud technology, helping their customers raise the bar on mission success, and this year is no different,” said Sandy Carter, Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector Partners and Programs, AWS. “The 2021 AWS Public Sector Partner award winners display a sincere commitment to impact the lives of our customers around the globe."