Published: 16 Mar 2023
Robust, Scalable And Secure Digital Services Delivered On Demand
Australia's Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry moves to cloud infrastructure in Azure to enable automated provisioning of robust, scalable and secure services
Enhancing agricultural industries and trade is a purpose of the Australian Government Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF). In 2020 the Australian Government budgeted A$500million for its Taking Farmers to Market program. Under this program, the government aims to modernise digital agricultural export systems to help Australian exporters remain competitive in the global marketplace.
DAFF partnered with LAB3 to move to cloud infrastructure and enable automated provisioning of robust, scalable and secure services.
It wasn't just about value for money but also our confidence in LAB3's ability to deliver, their previous experience in working with Microsoft and our other core partners in our vendor ecosystem, and their ability to work in a way that built capability within our organisation and our people.
Mark Sawade — Chief Information Officer, Department Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
Challenge
With the Taking Farmers to Market program, DAFF recognised it would need to deliver code to production multiple times a day. This would have broken its existing processes and technology platforms due to the traditional release cycles using on-premises infrastructure.
DAFF identified the need to move to a flexible development model – to democratise the delivery of digital services such that it's not just done centrally by a single IT team, but that it's done all over the organisation by teams of digital professionals. And this required being able to automate the provision of a dev environment, a test environment, a pre-production environment and even a production environment for end-to-end service delivery and providing as much autonomy as possible to their digital development teams.
To achieve this DAFF identified the need to move to cloud infrastructure which would allow automated provisioning of services, and which also needed to be robust, scalable and secure.
Approach
In partnership with DAFF, LAB3 implemented a technology environment dubbed Azure Platform One (APO) within months of commencing the engagement.
To do so, LAB3 used automation to build a modern Azure landing zone - an automated deployment of a Microsoft Azure platform built with the Terraform infrastructure-as-code software tool.
The APO was built with agile delivery at the forefront and security by design. APO enables DAFF to operate in a cloud-first world – quickly, extensively and securely.
APO is designed to scale because of the repeatability inherent with automation. It's also compliant with government requirements; security measures are built-in; and these are consistent with meeting the Infosec Registered Assessors Program and ISO 27001 cybersecurity standards.
With automation, DAFF can quickly develop and evolve modern apps on a cloud platform given innovation here is easier and more affordable.
Impact
Once the APO was built, DAFF was in a unique position to go ahead and develop and deliver world-leading services for the agriculture industry. In a matter of weeks, the first application developed and deployed on APO was a certificate scanner that allowed importers and customs officials to validate the QR codes printed on export certificates.
It wasn't just about value for money but also our confidence in LAB3's ability to deliver, their previous experience in working with Microsoft and our other core partners in our vendor ecosystem, and their ability to work in a way that built capability within our organisation and our people.
Mark Sawade — Chief Information Officer, Department Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry