ASG takes Airservices Australia to secure cloud in $84M deal

ASG Group has been awarded $84 million deal with Airservices Australia to provide a secure cloud platform and a full desktop-as-a-service solution.

The five-year contract allows for another five-year extension, according to ASG, with the project to begin in April.

The cloud platform will be delivered in partnership with Canberra-based cloud services wholesaler, Vault Systems, one of the first two Australian companies to be awarded with the "protected" level of certification from the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), the intelligence agency that sits within the Department of Defence.

Airservices Australia is the nation’s air navigation service provider, delivering the air navigation and aviation rescue firefighting services to the local aviation industry.

The organisation owns and operates a number of systems and services that are connected both internally and externally.

The contract is largely a result of ASG’s expanded capability and capacity following the acquisition of SMS Management and Technology in 2017, according to ASG chief operating officer Dean Langenbach.

“ASG will be providing best-in-breed technology and service to Airservices, but with the added security and flexibility to scale with business demand and deliver strong economic gains."

In August 2017, Airservices put out a request for proposal for the provision of infrastructure-as-a-service, saying that it wanted to engage the local IT community to partner with a vendor capable of helping it transform its IT service delivery infrastructure.

The project was expected to see the relocation and management – including support and maintenance – of the organisation’s end user compute functions and core compute functions, with the chosen service provider set to supply associated data centre facilities, support services and infrastructure.

At the time, Airservices’ core compute and end user compute environments were managed in-house and comprised of 150 physical servers, providing platform services for application hosting as well as the virtualisation platform, which offered 600 virtual machines.

The organisation’s existing IT infrastructure fleet includes approximately 5000 end user compute devices, comprising 2800 desktops and 2100 laptops, distributed across 50 locations within Australia.

In February, Airservices picked Thales Australia to carry out the $1.2 billion air traffic control system overhaul, after coming under scrutiny by the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) over its long-running procurement process of the OneSKY system.