NSW Emergency crews consider move to the cloud

Beverley Head
Wednesday, 16 December 2009 06:36

IT Industry - Market

The NSW State Emergency Service is starting to explore its computing options in the cloud – taking the first tentative steps by switching to a financial computing application being hosted on a shared services basis by its sibling agency the NSW Fire Brigades.

SES chief information officer Andrew Edwards said that the financial services application had gone live on December 2nd. He said that access to the system was also being provided to the Rural Fire Brigade and that there were plans to extend the service with SAP modules to cover human resources and learning management in the future.

The Fire Brigade installed SAP’s HR and payroll processing system about six months ago, intending to eventually make it available to other emergency agencies as part of the shared services model.

“We have been planning this for about four years,” said Edwards. “You get a whole lot of economies of scale. It’s a smarter way of doing business.

“We are talking to the Fire Brigade about other back office functions,” said Edwards who is keen to explore how other cloud based computing services could be brought into the SES.

The SES earlier this month announced it would be using cloud based email services provided by Microsoft in order to connect its 7,500 active volunteers by the end of January. Each active SES volunteer will receive their own email address and 15 GB of data storage as part of a technology upgrade worth $2million a year to the SES. The email services which Microsoft has donated are being delivered through its Live@edu service.

Edwards said that experience with the email cloud, in addition to using the shared services model being managed by the Fire Brigades would give him a better idea of how cloud based computing might benefit the SES further in the future, “Whether that is a public cloud, a private cloud or a hybrid. It could even be a Government cloud,” Edwards noted pointing to the recently closed call for expressions of interest for two geographically separate data centres which the NSW Government wants up and running by 2011.

Calls for expressions of interest for the data centres closed at the beginning of the month.

An alternative to a whole of government cloud might be an emergency services cloud which could serve the needs of agencies such as the SES, Rural Fire Brigade, Ambulance, Fire and Police services said Edwards.

The organisations are already working toward more information sharing to ensure that information provided to one service can either be redirected or shared with other emergency crews as required.

In the five years that Edwards has been with the SES the organisation has substantially increased its investment in technology from $1.3 million up to $8 million a year today. Over the next year, besides his cloud investigations, Edwards hopes to replace around 400 laptops and 200 desktop machines (about half the SES’ computer population) and make the transition from XP to Windows 7 and Office 2010.