Mark Sawade (Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry)
LAB3 has introduced cloud-based on-demand infrastructure for the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF) to lay the groundwork for the modernisation of its digital agricultural export systems.
LAB3 introduced a technology environment named Azure Platform One for the department through LAB3 Bedrock, an automated deployment of Microsoft Azure built with the Terraform open-source infrastructure-as-code software tool.
Reuben Bettle, director of federal government at LAB3, said the “cloud-first” infrastructure is designed to scale because of automation and is compliant with both the Infosec Registered Assessors Program (IRAP) and ISO 27001 cyber security standards.
Work on the project started in November 2021 and was used in DAFF’s first production service in June 2022 to support the department’s Taking Farmers to Market initiative, which sets out to modernise digital agricultural export systems.
The new infrastructure was needed as its previous setup could not handle it, according to Mark Sawade, CIO at DAFF.
“When I started in February 2021, the first thing my teams told me was this idea that with Taking Farmers to Market, we’d be delivering code to production multiple times a day,” he said.
“They also said this would break our existing processes and technology platforms due to our traditional release cycles using the on-premise infrastructure.”
LAB3 was chosen as the implementation partner, which came down to value for money, their experience with Microsoft and other core DAFF vendor partners and its ability to work within the department’s processes, Sawade added.
The end result allows DAFF to develop modern applications on a cloud platform that Bettle claims will make innovation “easier and more affordable”.
“This places the department in a unique position to develop and deliver world-leading services for the agriculture industry,” he added.
The first app developed and deployed on the platform was a certificate scanner that enabled importers and customs officials to validate QR codes printed on export certificates.
“It’s really important that it’s secure and highly available, because, of course, when you export products to the other side of the world, they’re receiving them when we’re asleep,” said Nick Woodruff, head of digital trade initiatives and strategy at DAFF.
“Building the app and deploying it, we couldn’t have done it without that infrastructure in place and it proved the validity of that platform.”
As well as developing new apps, the department is also migrating legacy apps into the new environment.
“It’s not just brand-new digital services – we’re taking export systems that process over a billion dollars of business a week [and] putting them up into that platform,” Woodruff said.
“Using Azure and the cloud, we can add security and availability to some of our legacy platforms without having to go back and re-architect them from the ground up.
“Then you think about traceability and provenance being a significant issue, to the idea of paddock to plate. So, the payload data carried with export certificates could also include traceability information or potentially integrate a whole bunch of other information flows and the Azure stack allows us to do that.”
LAB3, along with SoftwareONE and Wipro, previously tapped into Azure to modernise the bulk of Victorian energy provider AusNet Services’ data collection on-premises systems and bring them into the cloud, which was announced in August last year.
