Telstra has hatched a plan to build a cloud-based environment targeting the needs of Australia's federal, state and local government agencies.
Set to go live in the first half of 2015, Telstra said the service is designed to increase the ability of government organizations to access secure cloud services and help achieve their cloud first policy objectives across both "unclassified" and "protected" level data.
Two of the key elements that should resonate with agencies looking to make a move into the cloud are that their data will be hosted in Australia, while enabling them to gain greater efficiencies by handing off functions like storage and hosting to Telstra.
"Importantly, Telstra's Government Cloud will provide confidence that the data is safe and hosted in Australia," said Erez Yarkoni, executive director/cloud, Telstra Global Enterprise and Services, in a release. "It will also help enable the public sector to achieve greater efficiency and generate more value from its ICT investments."
To serve the public sector vertical, Telstra has a dedicated security approved team operating its secure service desk operations to government and operates a Government Accredited Secure Facility to provide proactive network security for customers' cloud networks, data, applications and devices.
Being Australia's incumbent telco, the service provider already has contracts with a number of the country's main agencies, including the Department of Defense, Department of Human Services and the Australian Customer and Border Protection Service.
This new cloud service plan also complements earlier collaborative efforts such as the investment in the Federal Government Managed Secure Network Gateway, which allows agencies to connect securely.
Cloud services overall have been a growing priority for the service provider not only in Australia, but also as a global offering. Outside of Australia, Telstra Global offers cloud services for its multinational business customers in five countries: United States, United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia.
For more:
- see the release
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