Turning Canberra into a Global Digital Hub
The Government has set its sights on making our national capital a global digital hub. Through initiatives such as Digital Canberra, developing a cloud computing-friendly environment, and harnessing the city’s technology-focused entrepreneurs and innovators, that vision is fast becoming a reality.
This week, Assistant Minister for Cities and Digital Transformation the Hon. Angus Taylor, helped me welcome the expanded Macquarie Government team that is helping us do our part to make the vision a reality.
One of the key focuses for the Minister and Digital Transformation Agency is to simplify the procurement process for technology services and enable smaller, home-grown businesses to deliver IT services to Government at all levels.
Partnership between Government and ACT businesses will help develop and grow the industry and drive the Government’s goal of making Canberra a global digital hub.
Emphasis on cloud
As I highlighted in a recent article, the Australian Government is acutely aware that cloud services will be a key enabler for whether 2017 will be the inflection point for the digital transformation agenda.
Many of Canberra’s thriving IT services businesses have been built around the cloud and it’s no secret that being ahead of the cloud services curve will be a decisive factor in Canberra’s success as a digital hub.
At Macquarie Government, we’re doing our part by investing in our Government cloud business in Canberra. In the past month alone, we’ve appointed experienced technologist Bart Thomas as General Manager, Government Cloud; and David Hirst, who has been with our company for more than nine years, to Group Executive to develop our data centre expansion plan.
That only scratches the surface – in the past few months we’ve grown our Government Cloud business in Canberra across the spectrum. It was my pleasure to introduce the new members of our team to Minister Taylor and celebrate our investment in Australian talent and cloud computing.
We began the year by announcing the completion of the expansion of our Canberra data centre and announced in August we were working through options to build or buy more data centre capacity to support Canberra and other regions’ growing demand for cloud services.
In November, we announced ASD accreditation of our PROTECTED cloud services, which makes us one of the only providers in Australia secure enough to host and manage government data classified up to PROTECTED level. Security is priority number one when it comes to the cloud. As we develop more services in this space, businesses’ main concern will always be whether data can be kept secure.
There is much to be done in cementing Canberra’s role as a digital hub, but through partnership between the Government and local IT services businesses, the groundwork has been laid. We look forward to continuing to work with the Government and our customers to play a part in seeing this vision through.
