Suncorp Group rolling out 13,600 Surface devices

Suncorp Group has signed a new three-year agreement with Microsoft covering its ongoing cloud migration as well as the deployment of up to 13,600 Surface devices to staff.  

The company has already rolled out 10,000 Microsoft Surface laptops to Australian and New Zealand employees, and intends to deploy an extra 3600 over the coming year.

It has also installed 150 Surface Hubs at its new headquarters in Brisbane and across Australia and New Zealand offices.

Surface Hubs are typically designed for meeting rooms or shared spaces, and include virtual whiteboard and conferencing functionality.

In Suncorp's case, it's expected the Surface Hubs will “help create collaborative hybrid meeting spaces that foster inclusion and ideation” and assist Suncorp’s disaster response teams when supporting customers during major natural disasters and weather events.

The Surface deployments are part of a "workplace of the future agenda" that Suncorp is implementing on a groupwide basis, the company said.

Suncorp general manager of IT infrastructure Charles Pizzato said it is “crucial” that teams are equipped with technology that allows flexibility “to deliver a fantastic experience for our customers.”

Suncorp cloud ambitions

The new Microsoft deal is expected to support Suncorp's cloud migration, which will ultimately see the organisation move 90 percent of workloads to public cloud by this year.  

The last 10 percent of workloads will run from a new hybrid cloud hosted in Sydney.

Suncorp said it is working with Avanade and various partners to accelerate the migration of workloads to Azure.

As previously reported by iTnews, Suncorp has a multicloud strategy, with workloads in AWS, Azure, and Kyndryl’s zCloud and pCloud.