The NSW Government and Microsoft have announced they will extend their partnership for a further five years to accelerate the digital transformation of the state.

The deal encompasses renewed support for 25 agencies and around 40,000 users across the health, transport, public safety and justice departments as well as civilian government.

The foundations for the renewed partnership were the NSW Government’s commitment to improve cybersecurity, as well as a decision to move 25 per cent of its ICT services to the public cloud by 2023.

The partnership is also expected to further support the state’s Government Beyond Digital strategy, which sets objectives and directions for NSW to assist in building a customer-centric, digitally enabled government, with two of its pillars being ‘building the digital economy’ and ‘engaging data insights’.

Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft said it would provide collaboration, security, communications and data analytics capabilities to NSW Government, whilst also modernising services using Microsoft Cloud.

“The agreement supports a number of our Beyond Digital priorities and has enabled access for a range of new users – in particular our volunteers, who have played such a significant role access across NSW over the past two years,” NSW Government chief information and digital officer, Greg Wells, said.

“The agreement will boost NSW Government employees’ technical capabilities with a comprehensive skilling and investment program, enables participation from SME and sovereign suppliers to the NSW Government and also  provides enhanced security, customer data protections and privacy services.”

As a part of Microsoft’s push to help modernise the systems and processes of NSW Government agencies, the bigtech firm said it would also include its support for the state’s growing Microsoft partner ecosystem.

Additionally, the agreement has already seen several new projects between the state government and the tech developer, which included projects at the NSW Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ), Dams Safety NSW and Local Land Services NSW.

For instance, as part of its NSW DCJ commitments, Microsoft will work with KPMG to replace the Department’s legacy payment and contracting system. Building on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform, the newly refreshed system will be used to manage the contracting and funding of approximately 1,800 service providers “across a wide spectrum of programs, service types and client groups”.