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Optus to offer cloud solution to government departments

A deal with Canberra Data Centres will see Optus offer cloud services, including IaaS, managed storage, and disaster recovery, to more than 40 federal government departments.
Written by Corinne Reichert, Contributor

Optus Business has announced that it will be offering its secure private cloud service to multiple Australian government agencies under a deal with Canberra Data Centres (CDC).

CDC has over 40 government departments already using the four centres it operates across two datacentres in Canberra, with Optus Business MD John Paitaridis saying this could grow as the federal government embarks upon its digital transformation program and fulfils its "cloud first" policy.

According to Optus, it will provide secure infrastructure as a service (IaaS), managed storage, and disaster recovery cloud solutions, as well as utilising CDC's venues to host its unified-communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) and contact-centre-as-a-service (CCaaS) offerings so as to sell these to government and enterprise customers in Canberra.

In an effort to simplify the process for government departments to choose cloud providers, the Australian government had established a Cloud Services Panel back in 2014.

"The panel aims to offer agencies scalable and flexible cloud services via industry offerings, and do so in a way that reduces the burden on industry," the government's CTO John Sheridan said at the time.

In March, Sliced Tech and Vault Systems received ASD Certification, allowing them to store highly classified government information in their cloud platforms.

At the time, an unclassified dissemination limiting marker (DLM) status -- allowing cloud providers to store sensitive government data at a less protected level -- was also granted by the ASD to seven cloud vendors: Sliced Tech; Vault Systems; Macquarie Telecom's GovZone offering; Amazon Web Services' (AWS) EBS, EC2, S3, and VPC offerings; IBM Bluemix; Microsoft's Azure, Dynamics CRM Online, and Office 365 platforms; and Salesforce's platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and SaaS offerings.

Optus' cloud partners include Microsoft, AWS, Dell EMC, HPE, Nutanix, NextDC, Cisco, VMWare, Optus subsidiary Ensyst, Pure Storage, and Interactive.

ZDNet understands that Optus Business will initially store unclassified information on its private cloud solutions while utilising its AWS and Azure partnerships for information needing additional certification in a hybrid cloud solution.

Optus Business added cybersecurity prevention, detection, and monitoring capabilities to its managed security services portfolio in September, with the solution running on Trustwave.

This year, Optus Business has signed a five-year datacentre, CCaaS, and cybersecurity deal with power utility Energy Australia; a five-year UCaaS deal with health services company Uniting; and a five-year AU$75 million UCaaS deal with travel agency Flight Centre.

Optus Business earlier this year also launched a series of cloud, collaboration, and infrastructure technologies alongside Cisco for the purposes of aiding government and enterprise customers in creating a "smart workplace".

Under the deal, the two companies are developing CCaaS and video-conferencing-as-a-service (VCaaS) solutions for use with Cisco's Jabber software, as well as integrating Cisco's Spark tool for collaboration through Optus Business' UCaaS solution and Cisco's Meraki cloud management system.

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