Mission Australia uses private cloud to improve staff services

Mission Australia has replaced 10-year-old legacy infrastructure with a private cloud service, enabling it to offer mobility services to 3500 staff.

The not-for-profit offers specialised services to help people get jobs, receive an education and find housing around Australia.

Mission Australia CTO Richard Walsh began working with NetApp and Cisco on the IT project 18 months ago. Through the implementation of a private cloud on the vendor’s FlexPod data centre infrastructure, Walsh and his IT staff developed a secure platform that allowed Web-enabled applications to be delivered to employee tablets, smartphones and laptops.

“We had a lot of applications that were not terribly mobile but now we can serve 450 offices around Australia with reliable access to data,” he said.

For example, staff can now access client information on the road or at home.

Walsh added that the rollout has allowed it to concentrate on projects which are important for the business such as application consolidation, Web enablement and security.

“We’re also working on a business intelligence [BI] initiative to report on the effectiveness of our programs. The business executives want to understand how we’re delivering services to the public.”

In addition, the FlexPod platform has reduced backup times from three hours down to minutes. Walsh said this is because it can take a backup “snap shot” of machines and apply templates.

The not-for-profit uses a co-located data centre but Walsh is keen to take advantage of more private cloud services.

“I can start programs like test development and disaster recovery via cloud mechanisms instead of growing my own infrastructure. I can leverage the cloud when it makes sense to,” he said.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

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