ATO is rewiring its cloud responsibility model

The Australian Taxation Office is evolving the way its developers and teams interact with public cloud services, allowing a greater degree of self-service, while also seeking further optimisation of consumption and costs.

(L-R) Zoe Holdenson (AWS) and Rhiannon Ross (ATO).

The evolution reflects the ATO’s status as “a digital government department”, senior cloud program director Rhiannon Ross told this month’s AWS Symposium Canberra.

Ross said the ATO’s move into cloud had elevated IT’s status over time, showing it could “absolutely move the pendulum when it comes to enriching business value.”

“Getting into the cloud space was a great idea and it was something that IT wanted to do. We sold the benefits for it, and our org said OK, but I think what’s happened is the trajectory of the success we’ve had from doing this piece of work has been tenfold,” she said.

That uptake is now driving some structural, technical and - above all - cultural changes in the way cloud services within the agency are treated and managed.

One of those changes is to the cloud services team itself.

“Rightly so many years ago, we wanted to be the gatekeeper,” Ross said.

“We wanted to make sure that the cloud services offering was very secure for our organisation.

“Now, that doesn’t change, but there are absolutely different ways of doing it. 

“We don’t now need to hold the key - we can make sure that responsibility model is understood across the org, and we can put other people in charge of some of that.”

This has already started, with cloud services now part of the ATO’s developer experience branch, as of about three months ago.

“We’re really wanting to change our model and put our developers really in the driving seat in the cloud space,” Ross said.

“One of the key pieces that we’re looking at is what self-service looks like in our org.”

Ross also foreshadowed changes to the ATO’s “responsibility model” for cloud services consumption, with one of the aims being to seed a focus on optimisation and costs, under what could be considered a FinOps program of work.

Asked what the ATO would like its cloud users to do differently, Ross said that “it’s about understanding where we’re at on our journey and … what your responsibilities are”.

“If you’re a cloud user, what I would love people to do is understand what their responsibilities are when using cloud,” she said.

Ross noted that this would mean further training for cloud user cohorts.

“It’s really important that [if] you’re in the cloud and you’re using the cloud, that you understand what these technologies are,” she said.

“From an ATO perspective, we were an on-premises organisation for many years. 

“We literally still have a lot of areas that still have that on-premises thinking, so it’s about how do you actually change that model and come along the journey with us.”

Ross also noted that FinOps is a much broader conversation than cloud services and developers and would require input and cooperation from other parts of the organisation to succeed.

At a minimum, she noted, it would mean “bringing Finance in on the story”; and “going down to the nth degree, you can’t do FinOps unless you’ve got asset tagging and asset management correct, so there’s another department you need to bring into the picture.”

“It’s like a web [of responsibility],” she said.

“This is never going to be an IT problem - it’s an ‘everybody problem’. 

“And it’s not an IT problem in terms of we need to fix the tech stack - this is a cultural piece that we need to make sure that everyone understands what they’re responsible for in our organisation. 

“We need to make sure that the processes support what we’re trying to do. We need to make sure that the reporting has the alerts, that we are supported by our tooling, and that there’s processes that back that up, so that if we’ve got alerts going off and [a team is] doing nothing about it, it needs to go further up the chain.

“The tooling you’ll need to manage your budget is basically the tooling you’ll need for the optimisation piece anyway. 

“It goes back to making sure you’ve got the information, the transparency of your cloud spend, [and] making sure that people understand what their responsibilities are when they are utilising [the] cloud.”

While calling optimisation “the next frontier”, Ross said the work built on existing efforts within cloud services that focused on managing the agency’s cloud budget.

Ry Crozier attended AWS Symposium Canberra as a guest of AWS.