Noosa Council is now the only local body in Australia with its entire IT infrastructure off site. It has adopted what the supplying company, Technology One, calls the “one council solution” – a move which has saved ratepayers $3 million in set up costs and $1 million in ongoing annual costs.

According to Martin Drydale, the council’s acting director of community infrastructure, Queensland Treasury Corporation estimated $4.5 million would be spent in building a data centre and buying equipment. “We’ve actually come in at $1.5 million.” 

He said: “Tech One is a very client-focussed, multi-national organisation working in Europe, Asia as well as Australia. They are very keen on delivering this business model throughout Australia and want it to be successful, just as we do obviously. The benefit of working with them in the early days is we are working with their top people.

“The biggest innovation is that we’re the only council in Australia which is fully on Cloud which basically means all of your IT infrastructure is off site. It is secure and we are the only ones that have access to our data. The other benefit is that we manage and keep our applications up-to-date.

“We have high availability and we only pay for what we use. It also has good disaster recovery. We are actually in an environment that is called ‘Active Active’, which effectively means our business systems are running at two separate data centres, 50km apart in Sydney. If one goes down, then our systems are automatically carried on by the second data centre.

“There is secure fingerprint identification access to the buildings. I’m told they even weigh people going in and weigh them coming out so they can’t walk out with any data or equipment they’re not supposed to! It’s a very secure environment.”

At the meeting of Noosa Council on Monday, acting CEO, Peter Franks referred to the dedication of the council staff who put in long hours to fulfil all aspects of the transfer from Sunshine Coast Council. 

Asked how long it took to put in the new IT infrastructure, Mr Drydale said: “I’ve worked in projects which have taken up to two years to complete but we did this in four months. Effectively, we had from September to December to put the infrastructure in place.We did everything from scratch, built networks, put in email as well as the business applications and then test them. We knew we had to be ready by January 1.”

Mr Drydale said it was “exciting to be doing something no-one else has done. It’s what we wanted for the council, to be innovative, to think outside the box and bring value to the community as best we could and at the cheapest cost.”