news The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has switched to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for the hosting of digital services across all its public-facing websites.
The AEC is responsible for conducting federal elections and referendums, and maintaining the Commonwealth electoral roll. AEC websites collectively receive over 100 million hits on election night alone, SMS said in a statement. With such a large volume of traffic, the AEC has opted to migrate of all of its public-facing websites into the AWS cloud.
The move was implemented by SMS Management & Technology (SMS). “SMS will implement a highly scalable and secure solution, leveraging the AWS cloud platform. In addition, SMS will provide ongoing cloud operational managed services to AEC to ensure the systems constantly improve with technological advances,” the firm said in a statement.
Murray Rosa, Director Managed Services for SMS, said: “AEC’s digital services are perfectly suited to a public cloud platform because of the varying demand. SMS, together with AWS, were able to provide a highly secure, scalable and flexible solution that responds rapidly to the peak capacity demands required during an election period.”
“We have also introduced a number of innovative approaches that make sure we make the most of the cloud services delivery model,” he said. “The additional benefit to the AEC here is our ability to provide a true ‘as-a-service’ offering. This means that the customer is only paying for what they use, not capacity or services ‘just in case’.”
Stefan Jansen, AWS’ Head of Channels and Alliances said: “Our public-sector customers understand the benefits of the AWS cloud to enable scale and support agility. We are excited to be working with SMS to help the Australian Electoral Commission manage high profile, event-driven workloads.”
Launched in 2006, Amazon Web Services is a collection of remote computing services that make up Amazon’s cloud-computing platform. AWS operates from 11 geographical regions across the world.
AWS is marketed as a way to provide large computing capacity more quickly and more affordably than a client company building its own actual server farm. More than a million customers, including startups, large enterprises, and government agencies across 190 countries, use AWS services, according to online sources.
aaand is that cloud data stored in AU or in some US datacentre where the NSA et al can pillage at will? :P
I believe amazon have servers that’s hosted in Australia?
Correct, they are building 2 new ones as well:
http://www.itnews.com.au/news/amazon-web-services-to-build-two-sydney-data-centres-396802
lol you realise these are currently publicly accessible websites and information now right? This likely just means that in the slack times between elections the sites will cost much less to host and can be scaled up dynamically when the peak loading happens during election weekend by throwing extra $ at amazon for a short period rather than be stuck with having hardware sitting idle for years on end.
ATO should look at this.
ATO stores some pretty sensitive data. Maybe a private cloud is more appropriate?
It is so-o-o-o refreshing to see Australian Government agencies throwing $$$$$$ at non-Oz-owned facilities. Of course, the obvious lesson is that despite {being|wanting-to-be} the “clever” country, we sort of… don’t quite cut it?
I remember asking the question a few weeks ago: “Are there any Australian-owned cloud… NO. Data Centers… in Australia?” We might want to add the qualifier “SECURE” to that question. And we definitely want to add “That DON’T use non-Australian software.”
Or is this asking too much?
How on earth can I be proud of my Aussie citizenship with the mob of merinos in Parliament House?
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