About Hydro Tasmania

Hydro Tasmania is Australia’s largest producer of renewable energy. Since its first hydropower development a century ago, Hydro Tasmania has led the nation in renewable energy development. Today, the utility uses a combination of water and wind power to harness natural energy that is sold on the national grid.

Hydro Tasmania also owns Momentum Energy, an electricity retailer that specialises in providing quality products and services to customers in Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia.

Challenge

Hydro Tasmania faced many technology challenges from supporting more than 100 different applications and environments. These included an ageing and costly infrastructure platform; lack of capacity to grow existing infrastructure; and the need to support new technologies to support its Momentum retail brand. The organisation also required a more agile and responsive platform to deliver cost effective and timely services to the Hydro Tasmania Group.

Rather than replacing its on-premise hardware, Hydro Tasmania decided to meet these challenges by adopting a “cloud first” strategy.

Success

Hydro Tasmania partnered with Acurus because of its experience in deploying challenging projects in the cloud. Acurus has since built the foundation of Hydro Tasmania’s cloud presence, implementing industry best practice security that enables the organisation to migrate its applications to the cloud.

Acurus started by working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide a detailed Proof of Concept process that demonstrated the value of cloud technology and migration processes for Hydro Tasmania. Acurus also provided a technology roadmap to modernise Hydro Tasmania’s technology platforms and migrate its services to the cloud.

Acurus worked with Hydro Tasmania’s architecture team to develop an initial design, select applications for migration and detail migration steps. Acurus worked with the application subject matter experts to identify application requirements and dependencies to ensure the project’s success, including security and compliance requirements. Acurus successfully migrated application workloads to the cloud, where they were tested by both technology and application owners. In many cases, these migrated servers out-performed on-premise environments.

Acurus has evolved that initial engagement into a strong strategic relationship with Hydro Tasmania. Acurus is currently engaging with Hydro Tasmania to migrate its core billing application to the cloud and is a key participant of its Retail Transformation Project.

Acurus is also working with Hydro Tasmania to implement industry best practice for Continuous Improvement Continuous Development (CI/CD) processes along with DevOp’s tools to mature its internal development team and integrate vendors into the new development environment.