Cutting costs to help Australians build for success

Secure Electronic Registries Victoria (SERV) manages property-related transactions and information services for thousands of Australians every day. From property owners to financial institutions, lawyers to state agencies, SERV guide Australians through the Victorian property market.

As with the building of any Victorian skyscraper, however, the number of transactions which SERV were receiving daily was going up and up. At peak times, it can receive more than 11,000 transactions a day.

“There is a high expectation that our digital operations are always running,” Ani Chakraborty, business transformation director, says. “Our web-based transaction applications need to be continuously available to thousands of daily users.

“For example, a legal professional who does property-related work may need to complete documentation at any time — even at midnight or during weekends.”

The organisation already used a range of Amazon Web Services (AWS) as well as its own on-premises environment for its applications. Bringing everything together under one AWS roof, however, would provide stability in the organisation’s IT structure.

After asking Datacom to assist in migrating all its apps to AWS, SERV found many more benefits from now using the cloud computing service.

Over the last 12 months, we have reduced our infrastructure hosting costs by 60 per cent.

On top of now using AWS security services and AWS-based application monitoring tools to protect customer data, and Amazon GuardDuty to help detect threats to customer security, the organisation could also use Amazon CloudWatch to capture performance and health metrics, and Amazon Elasticsearch Service to perform application log analysis and reporting.

This has now all helped SERV to improve not only its services to thousands of Australians but also its costs, the way it can recover from potential disasters, and its ability to adapt to customer needs.

“Over the last 12 months, we have reduced our infrastructure hosting costs by 60 per cent,” says Ani.

“In some of our key applications, we were able to achieve disaster recovery within 30 minutes – a vast improvement compared to the 16 hours it could take prior to moving to AWS.

“We can also update our application faster, which means we can provide fewer scheduled outages to our customers. Previously, code deployments would take us up to two days. Now, however, we can do them in about four hours now so we can actually release new features more regularly instead of twice a year.”

SERV can also now ensure it is compliant with industry regulations, such as the ISO 27001 information security standard.

“Being ISO 27001 certified gives our external stakeholders a lot of confidence that we have the fundamentals in place in relation to compliance, so sensitive data in our custodianship is well protected.

“In the first 16 months since we migrated to AWS, there were no cybersecurity or data security breaches. As we adopt additional AWS services in the future, we are confident that we can continue to enable compliance and high availability while delivering the best experience possible to our customers.”

With the right foundation in place, SERV can now perform critical functions in Victoria’s real-estate industry and help Australians build for success.

“Following our move to AWS, we can deliver a reliable and stable property transaction and information services solution for Victorian property owners and aspirants.”