The government in Australia has undertaken a number of measures over the last two years to bring cloud computing into the fold for data management and consolidation and efficiency. This week another agency within the government made a move toward considering the possibility, especially since it handles a wide variety of data from a number of sources—and all for different sub-agencies and groups.
Geoscience Australia is a government agency that handles resources, energy, and tourism matters in Australia and also provides geoscientific information for government and civic uses. The agency monitors resource exploitation issues, environmental management and protection, sustainable and energy infrastructure monitoring and a host of other projects.
As the leading public sector source for environmental planning, mapping and data mining for energy, resource and other matters, the agency has a great demand for data management infrastructure, including massive storage, database and compute resources.
The Australian Department of Finance has suggested that the agency should consider a move to a singular system that will refine data management and improve current deduplication efforts. According to the Finance Department, a move to cloud computing might allow the agency to combine ICT efforts to work toward a more unified way of computing, thus leading to better organization.
According to a report this week, the agency is looking for ways to simplify their complex systems for data management, which currently include roughly 3,000 applications that manage a variety of sub-organizations under Geoscience Australia’s umbrella. Reports indicate that of this list of applications, the majority are off-the-shelf codes.