Cenitex rolls out multi-cloud project

Victoria's shared IT services provider to state government agencies, Cenitex, is set to exit its data centres by 2025, and move to a multi-cloud model.

Alexis Ewing.

The state-owned enterprise, which serves more than 69,000 users, revealed in its annual report [pdf] that it had kicked off a three-year multi-cloud strategy. 

A $5.2 million funding injection from the state government was spent on early works such as developing a hybrid cloud mediation layer, and planning for the eventual exit from Cenitex’s primary data centre.

Executive director infrastructure services Alexis Ewing told iTnews exiting its data centres is a key driver for the project, with “lights-out” planned for 2025.

During 2022, Cenitex also uplifted its managed private cloud to VMware Cloud Foundation to support hybrid cloud, and launched application modernisation services to move customer applications away from out-of-support legacy Windows operating systems.

Ewing told iTnews the aim is “to enable a digital Victorian government”.

Right now, Cenitex is “predominantly a data centre-based organisation, with some cloud, infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), and software-as-a-service (SaaS)."

“We’ve got a mix of virtual servers, virtual machine farms, and a lot of legacy hardware,” Ewing explained, which brings with it the support structure needed “in looking after a predominantly hardware-based environment”.

Moving to a multi-cloud environment will let Cenitex “capture the individual strengths of cloud providers, and create competition between them and their integrators”, while avoiding lock-in to a single provider, she said.

A cloud-agnostic approach with a business and application mindset will provide for long-term growth, Ewing added.

She identified other benefits as flexibility and choice for government, and the chance to access different features offered by different cloud service providers.

Three-phase approach

Cenitex is pursuing a three-phased approach to the multi-cloud rollout.

The first, Ewing said, will be to “help customers get off the physical legacy hardware, into a virtualised environment.

“We have a software-defined data centre established, and we recently upgraded to VMware Cloud Foundation," she said.

“That gives us the capability to move applications and get them cloud-ready.”

When the applications are cloud ready, Ewing said, the second phase would be “enabling customers to burst into the cloud, through things like AVS [the Azure VMware Solution] and VMC, the VMware instance on AWS.”

To implement the second phase, she said, Cenitex will have to understand the security requirements of the cloud environment.

“We’re also looking at the networking components – moving away from MPLS to an SD-WAN offering”.

The third phase will see Cenitex complete its exit out of its existing data centres.

Customer application migration will be ongoing throughout the process, she said.

“Throughout the first two phases, customers will be moving their applications, getting them cloud ready.”

All applications will need “a treatment plan”, she said – something like AWS’s '7 Rs' migration strategy, for example.

Some applications may be retired, and others refactored, which Ewing said would be worth the effort.

“In the cloud-native environment, the architecture of applications changes," she said.

“You move to a more modular design, which creates flexibility. When business requirements change, customers just click in a new module, so they don’t have to rewrite the application.”

The other project that will be ongoing in all three phases is automation, she said, starting with “basic” automation such as using VMware Cloud Foundation to enable orchestration across multiple environments.

The end goal of orchestration is a fully self-service IT environment.

“Customers want the ability to self-serve,” Ewing said. “They want to manage their own environments, in a structure and secure environment that provides the appropriate guardrails.”

By phase three, she said, Cenitex is looking at advanced self-service, advanced data insights, and solution life-cycling to deliver cost optimisation.

Execution

Making it all happen is a cultural exercise, Ewing said.

“We’re establing a cloud centre of excellence … bringing our organisation into a framework that enables cloud best-practice,” she said.

That will let Cenitex “tap into the right resources at the right time to enable the most impactful multi-cloud environment.”

The three pillars of the centre of excellence will be to driver high quality cloud solution, to standardise cloud adoption and growth, and to strengthen cloud expertise both in Cenitex and in its customers.

Ewing is confident that the lights-out date of 2025 for the data centre will be achieved.

“Quite often when you hear the word 'roadmap', it’s conceptual and a target to achieve," she said.

“Our roadmap has a robust master schedule that spans the three years; there are identified and agreed activities in order for us to achieve lights-out at the three-year mark."