Queensland regional council overcomes skills gap, accelerates hybrid cloud journey and frees IT to improve employee and citizen experience.
Nutanix, a leader in hybrid multi-cloud computing, has helped Central Highlands Regional Council better support its field workers operating in remote areas, while overcoming technical skills gaps, by enabling digitization of its community services.
Located in Central Queensland and home to 30,000 residents, the Central Highlands Regional Council works across an area of around 60,000 square kilometers. Together with trusted IT partner Truis, the council developed a digital strategy to help it overcome these challenges and align with its ethos of becoming a progressive region, creating opportunities for all.
“Our council area is almost the size of Tasmania, and this means our workers can spend a lot of time on the road or in isolated areas – often in areas prone to connectivity issues,” said Clinton Nicol-Dickson, Information Communication Technology Manager at Central Highlands Regional Council.
By overhauling its IT infrastructure, Nutanix has helped the council improve mobility and give its crews the resources they need to manage and respond to citizen requests while out in the field.
With less time spent keeping the lights on, the IT team has reclaimed strategic bandwidth which has allowed it to focus on helping workers overcome the isolation of working in remote areas. The team has made significant progress in improving this by deploying signal boosters for vehicle connectivity and rolling out a shared device scheme on IOS tablets.
“While the tablets grant easy access to work emails, intranet and ERP systems, the strategy also supports the welfare of our 150 field workers, side-stepping issues of isolation with access to personal applications, including online banking and communications platforms to stay in touch with friends and family,” said Nicol-Dickson
When it comes to talent, the rurality of the council has made finding skilled IT workers a challenge. In the small IT team of four, the former three tier infrastructure was complex to manage, consuming a lot of time and energy on low-value tasks.
To shift IT from a cost-center to a strategic partner delivering greater value to the business, the council established a managed services agreement with Truis to help Nicol-Dickson and his team do more with less – transforming the council’s IT infrastructure and supporting its hybrid cloud journey.
“The goal was to lift IT from being the organization’s sandbag, and actually demand more from it,” added Nicol-Dickson. “We have a fairly well-established Azure tenant – particularly around backup – but we’re continuing to evaluate cloud services when replacing existing solutions as part of our strategy. That was another appeal of Nutanix, it could interact with those cloud environments and make the process of migrating a VM seamless and less resource intensive.”
With its technical expertise and long relationship with the council, Truis identified the Nutanix Cloud Platform as the ideal solution to meet the council’s needs in gaining the most out of its current resources – both human and digital.
“Truis provided us with the technical expertise to migrate our systems to Nutanix without any disruption,” Nicol-Dickson said. “We’ve worked with Truis in the past and have developed a really strong, trusted relationship because they go above-and-beyond in the levels of service they offer and their commitment to our success.”
Deployed within two months, the implementation leverages Nutanix’s AHV hypervisor, Prism Central centralized management platform, and Files software-defined storage for data management and analytics.
“Implementing an invisible layer of technology that automates new workloads and reduces human intervention in low-level processes, means we don’t have to worry about just keeping the lights on anymore,” said Nicol-Dickson.
“We’ve actually cut down administrative tasks by 25%, giving staff the bandwidth for more strategic projects, all the while slashing data center footprint by 50%.
“Streamlining the many processes involved with property development is just one example of how we’re digitalizing services to improve touch-points and our residents’ way of life.”
Neville Vincent, Vice President at Nutanix A/NZ, ASEAN and India at Nutanix, said people are hungry for faster, better connected digital services at their fingertips, and that realization has pushed more and more business leaders to come knocking on IT’s door.
“Alongside the thirst for scaled digital services, IT departments are often plagued by zero-budget increases, and public sector organizations are far from immune. Councils need the infrastructure in place to free up talented IT professionals, helping them deliver innovative outcomes quicker and easier with less resources,” he said.
“By removing the complexity at its core, Central Highlands Regional Council is encouraging innovation to spill out of the IT department, improving experience and creating opportunities for workers and residents – wherever they’re located in the region.”
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