Airservices Australia looks at outsourcing IT

Mulls going all-in with cloud

Airservices Australia is considering a largescale outsourcing of its IT, including potentially shifting away from managing its own infrastructure to using cloud services.

The organisation’s core IT infrastructure is currently housed in a third-party data centre in Canberra, which holds 41 physical servers, and two main server rooms in the Allan Woods Building in Canberra; between them they house 109 physical servers. (Airservices also runs smaller server rooms in Melbourne and Brisbane.)

It currently runs more than 440 applications across 600 virtual machines.

Airservices says it is interested in potentially moving to an infrastructure as a service environment.

“Airservices is scoping the possibility of shifting from on-premises infrastructure to purchasing a secure, highly available elastic infrastructure Hybrid model for hosting of Airservices applications,” documents issued by the agency state.

The organisation is keen to cut hosting costs and appoint a third party to take responsibility for end-to-end infrastructure support.

Beyond the potential use of IaaS, the organisation is looking at consumption-based models for network, OS management and maintenance, security and data management.

If a transition goes ahead, the aim would be to move to a fully managed service environment including backup as a service, storage as a service, platform as a service and infrastructure as a service.

Airservices currently has a fleet of around 5000 end user compute devices (comprising 2800 desktop PCs and 2100 laptops), many of which are approaching end of life, and the organisation says it is looking at having a third party refresh and manage its fleet.

Airservices Australia provides air traffic control, aviation rescue and fire fighting and air navigation services

The organisation in August reintroduced the CIO role after scrapping it in 2014, with former Westpac infrastructure head, Chris Seller, taking charge of IT.

In October it slashed its IT headcount by around 50.

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