In 2020 AusNet Services started a journey to overhaul and modernise their digital platforms, services and processes. With a reliance on at-risk and aging infrastructure, legacy systems and ad-hoc approaches to development and support, AusNet identified that Azure cloud services offered solutions to many of their challenges.

AusNet had initially explored other public cloud offerings, but were frustrated by the uncertainties and projected timelines associated with migrating their existing applications, databases and workloads to a new cloud platform.

Assured by LAB³’s deep technology expertise and proven track record of capability uplift, AusNet selected  LAB³ as a delivery partner that could help them leverage smart automation and accelerate their digital transformation.

The LAB³ approach to infrastructure as code allowed AusNet to deploy an Azure landing zone quickly and efficiently, enabling rapid deployment and a secure, compliant platform ready for AusNet’s workloads.

In a matter of 6 weeks, LAB³ was able to provide a complete assessment of the AusNet technology environment.

By utilizing LAB³ Dr Migrate, AusNet were able to attain a clearly defined migration plan, map the integrations and data flow between applications, and identify the criticality and complexity of each.

This prepared both LAB³ and AusNet’s teams to accelerate their migration away from at-risk on-premises infrastructure and into a flexible, secure cloud platform.

Through LAB³’s guidance, planning and support, AusNet quickly identified the key enterprise systems (such as SAP) that would benefit from Azure’s platform and services.

In addition to their enterprise applications, several critical customer facing and public support systems (such as the Dial Before You Dig database) were also migrated to Azure. This allowed AusNet to reduce their running and maintenance costs and introduce flexibility, scalability and speed-to-provisioning that was constrained by on-premises infrastructure.

Over 18 months AusNet successfully implemented a new Azure Cloud Platform, standardised their approach to cloud management, and migrated over 60% of their daily workload to the cloud.

The new platform and ways of working introduced reliability, scalability, and security to their most critical systems and enabled the organisation to explore more intelligent use of their available data.

AusNet was also able to improve the way they develop and deploy new technology and empower decision makers to take a ‘cloud first’ approach to future business requirements.