Accenture helps ATO move to Amazon Web Services

Accenture has helped move one of the Australian Taxation Office's mission-critical applications to Amazon Web Services, it was revealed yesterday.

According to the ATO, the cloud first strategy was adopted for two main reasons: client and staff experience.

Craig Fox, ATO service operations A/g first assistant commissioner, said that to deliver highly available, modern services, "the way we were delivering IT solutions wasn’t going to deliver the client outcomes that we were looking for, so we knew we needed to change and we absolutely knew that cloud was a part of that”.

The 18-month relationship with AWS has been positive, said Fox, explaining that Accenture had been responsible for the pilot test that showed that cloud services could be a success for the ATO.

Accenture is a major AWS partner, and last year unveiled a joint venture named Accenture AWS Business Group during the vendor's re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

Fox said: “Some of the disruption that we have seen of a very positive nature in the ATO has really started from the time that we adopted this relationship with AWS."

He added that another driver for the change was the need to reduce infrastructure costs.

The current commercial agreement between the cloud giant and the ATO runs for the next two years.

The ATO has taken a mission-critical application to to the cloud, with an AWS solution supporting the tax agent community during the current tax time period.