Unisys has won a three year, $16.48 million contract to design, build and manage secure cloud infrastructure for the Bureau of Meteorology.
The contract includes upgrading the Bureau’s WAN.
The Bureau went to market in late 2017 seeking a vendor to “supply, design, build and run” an infrastructure platform, with the agency awarding the contract to Unisys in April.
The contract includes provisions for potential extensions up to nine years.
The Bureau’s corporate plan states it intends to “increase use of managed and cloud-based solutions to reduce complexity and maintenance overhead”.
In January 2018, the agency migrated its public websites from on-premises hardware to Amazon Web Services, which the agency said last year had saved it “significant” operational expenditure.
“The Bureau’s services are used to assist in making life-impacting decisions – from whether to embark on a family fishing trip, to calculating how much fuel an aircraft requires for a flight,” said Unisys Asia Pacific vice president and general manager Rick Mayhew.
“The new hybrid cloud infrastructure, designed and supported by Unisys, will provide a secure and resilient environment to better support current services, as well a modern operating environment with the scalability to quickly and effectively implement future requirements.”
The Bureau is a new client for Unisys.
The 2018-19 federal budget included funding for the second tranche of a program to improve the security and resilience of the Bureau’s IT systems and observations network infrastructure.
Initial funding for the program was earmarked in the federal budget a year earlier, and followed reports in late 2015 that the agency’s systems had been accessed by a hacker.
In 2016 then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said that a “significant cyber intrusion” had taken place at the Bureau.