Credit: Photo by Kenrick Mills on Unsplash
DXC Technology has wrapped up the federal government’s Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority’s (APVMA) migration to the cloud as it works to undertake a major digital overhaul amid a move from the nation’s capital to Armidale, NSW.
The APVMA is the Australian Government’s statutory agency responsible for the management and regulation of all agricultural and veterinary chemical products in Australia, including things like fly spray and animal medicines.
The authority has been in the process of relocating the majority of its operations from Canberra to Armidale in regional NSW as part a Government Policy Order (GPO) issued in 2016 — a move offered an ideal trigger for the modernisation of the APVMA’s infrastructure and to prepare it to become more of an online, rather than paper-based, operation.
The migration from third-party managed data centres and into the cloud for platform-as-a-service, backup-as-a-service and security-as-a-service was core to the organisation’s overarching Enabling Technology program, which outlines the roadmap for transforming APVMA into a digitally enabled regulator by 2022.
This is where DXC technology comes in, with the global systems integrator (GSI) helping the Authority complete its migration from on-premises information systems to Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure.
Besides managing the cloud transition and deploying cloud-based applications, including Microsoft 365 and Dynamics 365, DXC Technology will also provide the APVMA with an array of managed IT services, aimed at allowing it to focus on its core purpose as a regulator.
Additionally, the APVMA is working with DXC Technology on implementing Dynamics 365 to manage workflow and provide an enterprise customer relationship management (CRM) slated for completion later this year.
Customer engagement is a priority for the organisation as it interacts with companies developing pesticides and veterinary medicines for the Australian market.
For Smith, the work already undertaken by DXC positioned the organisation well to pivot to a remote work scenario as the spread of COVID-19 began to disrupt normal work patterns for many employees.
“We moved away from desktops in the first place, migrated everybody onto laptops as stage one, bringing on Skype for Business and getting our people to utilise the digitised files that are already available in the system,” Smith said.
"The COVID-19 impact on the APVMA has been absolutely minimal because on 25 March 2020, when the executive took the decision that we should all work from home, staff picked up their headsets and laptops and are successfully working from home," he added.
