Revenue NSW has put out a call to market seeking a cloud migration partner to help overhaul ageing infrastructure and develop a “future cloud platform”.

The partner would be sought to help migrate the agency’s “Crown Jewel” applications to a new cloud platform, as well as providing functionality and performance testing.

Following a recent spate of service outages, Revenue NSW deemed the infrastructure overhaul and cloud migration process “imperative”.

Revenue NSW manages the collection of revenues, administering grants, and debts for the state, with more than 60 ‘products’, or agency functions, that collect upwards of $30 billion – more than a third of the state budget.

The agency, the tender documents state, maintains a “critical dependency” on the continuous operation of these applications.

Currently, Revenue NSW uses around 80 applications running across 699 virtual machines. These machines are hosted on infrastructure within NSW Government Data Centres (GovDC), which support products that process fines, fees, and grants as well as land and business taxes.

Existing Revenue NSW infrastructure will reach its end of life by July 2021, exposing the agency to an “increased risk of business disruption, outages, and security breaches”, according to tender documents.

A recent systems outage, which impacted “all Revenue NSW core systems”, was the result of a failure in the agency’s storage infrastructure, tender documents state. The outage affected both staff and customers, giving further credence to those calling for an immediate systems upgrade.

Revenue NSW applications with “highly volatile demand”, such as Unclaimed Money, a service to help citizens find lost money from entities like superannuation funds, have also experienced outages in recent years, the tender states, resulting in failures by the agency to meet peak demand.

Recent crises, including the devastating summer bushfire season and Covid pandemic, have demanded increasingly agile applications to support “significant influxes” in demand, the agency added, as well as rapid deployment of new solutions and infrastructure – the rollout of the Government’s bushfire duty 2019/20 relief scheme, which provided financial assistance to NSW residents who had lost their homes to the fires, offers a fitting example of the rapid development and deployment capability the agency requires moving forward.

The “Crown Jewel Applications” are Revenue NSW’s most valuable assets, and include a range of applications, such as the Infringement Management Processing System (IMPS), which accepts and refunds payments and processes interventions such as statutory declarations.

Other Crown Jewels include the Fine Enforcement System (FES), and Debtrak, the core of the Debit Collection Platform (DCP), which provides the entire debt management lifecycle, as well as the Modernised Advanced RECOUPS System (MARS), a web application providing functions for managing business taxes, land tax, duties and other levies for NSW Government.

Candidates for the cloud migration tender will be assessed on their ability to minimise “the number of virtual machines, databases, and storage” required to be migrated.

Successful applicants must achieve a “like for like” migration of these and associated applications.

This includes applying “integration testing, user acceptance testing and performance testing” to ensure all programs have been migrated successfully.

Applicants will need to show “demonstrated experience in delivering a cloud-based migration program of comparable scale and complexity”, with limited impact to the organisation’s operations.

Revenue NSW expects all applications to be migrated to the cloud by 30 June 2021.