Leidos Australia scores AU$16m BoM data management contract
Leidos Australia has been awarded a data management platform contract by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) as part of the Bureau's wider IT transformation program.
Valued at the AU$16 million over three years, the contract will see Leidos Australia deliver a data management platform to help BoM meet its information access needs, data governance and information life cycle management policies, procedures, and products, as well as support the addition of emerging information capabilities.
Work on the project commenced in late November.
Leidos Australia is the same IT provider contracted by the Australian Tax Office (ATO) to deliver a modernisation project that will include a new IT service management platform, service integration and management model, as well as enhance the current information technology infrastructure library processes.
The ATO renewed its contract with Leidos at the end of last year for a value of AU$87 million.
Last month, BoM handed out another contract worth AU$15.7 million to Vocus to provide BoM with network connectivity from its own fibre footprint and NBN's business satellite services.
BoM also awarded Unisys a three-year contract valued at approximately AU$16.48 million to design, build, and manage new cloud infrastructure and upgrade its wide area network to support current weather services.
Under the contract, which was awarded in Q2 of 2019, Unisys will have the option for multiple extensions with a total maximum term of no more than nine years.
The infrastructure contracts follow a spate of security-related incidents that BoM has had to face in the last few years.
The last incident saw a 33-year-old man arrested and charged by the Australian Federal Police (AFP) for allegedly manipulating the computer programs at the BoM to mine cryptocurrency while being employed as a government IT contractor.
The BoM CEO and director of meteorology Dr Andrew Johnson also confirmed during Senate Estimates in May 2018 that the bureau had suspended a third-party for serving up "fake news" advertising material on its website that was connected to bitcoin-based scams.
Back in 2015, BoM was also caught up in a major cybersecurity incident, even though the BoM claimed at the time that no sensitive data was taken during the incident.
The BoM was previously called out for having one of 14 government IT projects that the Digital Transformation Agency is watching closely. The BoM project that was named was ROBUST.
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