The New Zealand Government's Ministry for the Environment focuses on providing environmental management systems, including laws, regulations and national environmental standards, national direction through policy statements and strategies, guidance and training on best practice, and information about the health of the environment.

The IT service delivery model it used however created several challenges. It required the team to possess a large range of general IT skills, created single points of failure and caused staff to focus too much on maintaining it rather than focusing on how it could be used to help the Ministry achieve its goals.

Outdated equipment and on-site servers, which carried a high business risk, also did not help the issue. The Ministry needed a modern, scalable solution to improve its disaster recovery and business continuity.

In line with the government’s ICT Strategy and Action Plan, which encouraged ministries and agencies to deliver better, trusted public services, the Ministry was able to save money by using the services that Datacom was already providing to another government department: Land Information New Zealand (LINZ).

Datacom's cloud services for government helped to relocate the Ministry’s applications and support and infrastructure management services.

The more, dynamic IT environment has given the Ministry more flexibility, as well as access to additional resource pools.

More than 70 virtual machines share a common resource pool, which has helped to address the Ministry’s business continuity risk and increased its resource and capacity management.

The consolidation of its IT services has also helped the Ministry to refocus and spend more time on assessing how IT can help enable it to achieve its outcomes, including caring and investing in New Zealand’s natural resources.

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Public sector
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Cloud services