Deloitte invests $10 million on cloud computing foundations

Beverley Head
Friday, 02 October 2009 07:41

IT Industry - Market

Professional services specialist Deloitte is spending $10 million transitioning to a single consolidated data centre, and starting its journey toward developing an on demand cloud computing service for both its own staff and external clients.

Deloitte has been running two primary data centres in Sydney, but by the end of November will operate just one according to chief information officer Tim Fleming. The organisation has signed a deal with a third party to host the data centre in a facility near Mascot in Sydney’s South.

“We are moving into a facility that has a lot of room for expansion,” said Fleming. At the same time he says the move will lead to cost savings thanks to systems rationalisation and an accelerated virtualisation programme. At present 40% of Deloitte’s servers are virtualised, at the completion of the transition to the new single data centre this will rise to 60%. “Our longer term target is for just about everything to be virtualised,” says Fleming.

“Also the future is about building an internal on demand cloud to support the internal and growing external needs.” Called Project Unity the move across to the single data centre will be completed at the end of November and will also involve the establishment of high speed (10 GBit) dark fibre connections between Sydney and Melbourne where the bulk of Deloitte’s staff are based.

Anthony Veale, leader of Deloitte’s Australian forensic practice and the firm’s data analytics capability, says that Deloitte’s commitment to technical innovation is one of the pillars of its five year business plan “and responsible for an 11% growth in the last 12 months.”

“I form part of the enterprise information management team which has 180 people, 60 of whom are dedicated to analytics."

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