The New South Wales Department of Trade and Investment is eyeing a hybrid cloud approach as a stepping stone towards moving away from owning and operating its own infrastructure.
The organisation is seeking to towards software-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service, but an initial step in its cloud journey will be having disaster recovery and dev and test environments delivered via infrastructure-as-a-service.
"The department will move ICT Infrastructure to IaaS delivery and move away from managing and owning its own. This will initially be delivered through a Hybrid Cloud model," states a tender document released yesterday.
"This means a mix of rented capacity in a cloud based Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers and the remaining infrastructure hosted in the NSW Government data centres."
It's "highly desirable that the IaaS platform is delivered "from public facilities in Australia or the NSW Government datacentres in Unanderra and / or Silverwater."
The DR environment must handle 40TB of data, with an annual growth rate of 30 per cent. The department's dev and test environment comprise around 100 virtual machines with an average of 4GB of RAM, two virtual processers and a total of 20TB of storage.
The state government last year released its cloud services policy. "To progress the transition to a service orientation, NSW Government agencies will now be required to evaluate cloud-based services when undertaking ICT procurements to determine the ICT delivery model that provides the best value sustainable investment, taking account of the full range of cost-benefit considerations," the policy states.
In June version 3.1 of the state government's Procure IT framework took effect, which included an 'as a service' module for procurements.