Department of Health announces Google Cloud migration

The Australian Department of Health and Aged Care has engaged Google Cloud to help the department consolidate its data assets to ensure greater regulatory compliance.

The project will also be aimed at helping the department increase cost savings while speeding time to market of new innovations.

Under the agreement, the department will initially migrate its Hadoop workloads to the Google Cloud Platform, before unifying data assets from a range of internal sources on a single repository managed by Google’s BigQuery serverless enterprise data warehouse technology.

Google Cloud will also train an initial 70 department staff in the use of Google Cloud’s analytics platform.

The department selected Google Cloud for the migration following a competitive tendering process. Google was selected for its strong compliance and security credentials, including its Certified Strategic Status for cloud services.

Google Cloud Director, Public Sector for Australia and New Zealand Brian Senior said the project will confer the department with a number of benefits.

“Consolidating the department’s data and analytics capabilities has the potential to generate substantial savings while further bolstering compliance and security across sensitive national healthcare data — both key themes for the Australian Government’s long-term digital strategy,” he said. “We’re delighted the Department of Health & Aged Care has selected Google Cloud to help govern and secure citizens’ personal data against increasingly sophisticated threats, while also creating a more conducive environment for digital innovation and skills development within Australia’s public sector.”

Google Cloud also has customers within the Australian public sector including Australia Post, the CSIRO and the NSW Department of Customer Service.

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