Tasmanian government selects local partners for cloud transition

The Tasmanian Government has selected four local partners as part of its whole-of-government transition to the cloud.

Michael Ferguson, minister for information technology and innovation, announced on Tuesday that the government would fund six contracts valued at $105 million to support Tasmania’s new communications network infrastructure.

TasmaNet, Tasmanian Networks (TasNetworks), Telstra and TPG have already been chosen to provide connection and data centre services under panel arrangements for the Networking Tasmania (NT) III project, worth $95 million combined over the next 13 years.

Under the Tasmanian Cloud policy unveiled in October, the state’s government agencies plan to have transitioned most of their ICT to ‘on-island’ cloud services by 2018.

This will include data centre services (DCaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS), and related services, established under the Networking Tasmania (NT) agreements.

The project will require all state agencies to use the Tasmanian Cloud for most of their information and services, where this is feasible and meets agency business requirements.

The new Data Centre Services – to securely store data on-island – will initially be provided by TasmaNet and TasNetworks, in an estimated spend of $10.4 million over the next 13 years. A third tenderer for data centre services is in early negotiations with the state government. In July, the government awarded iiNet (now owned by TPG) a Networking Tasmania III contract for whole-of-government Internet services, successfully transitioning from Telstra on October 26.

According to Ferguson, the government has more than 1000 fixed connections to sites, 5000 connections from mobile or other remote access services, 3000 Wi-Fi connection points, and 160 other value-added services.

“All government services, from libraries and schools to law courts, policing and health care, depend on ICT services underpinned by critical infrastructure provided under the Networking Tasmania (NT) agreements,” he said. “We want to be able to deliver services to Tasmanians as one government, with collaborative service delivery, rather than as a group of disparate agencies.

“Government employees should have secure and controlled access ‘anywhere, anytime’ to the ICT services which they need to do their jobs.”

The Liberal government’s ICT policy states that “by establishing a four-year goal of moving to on-island data sovereignty arrangements (where all public sector data is stored on data centres within Tasmania) we will be protecting security of data, employing Tasmanians and reducing the cost of data traffic on the Bass Strait links,” the policy states.