Department of Health hunts for enterprise computing partner

The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing (the Department) is seeking to engage an enterprise computing service partner (EC service partner) to deliver enterprise computing (EC) services within a complex MultiVendor Environment (MVE) ICT environment.

As part of these services, the EC service partner will be expected to supply EC services for the purpose of providing compute, storage, data centre network and cloud services to support Department applications.

These services include platform engineering, data centre presence management, middleware management, database management (private and public cloud), data centre compute, storage and networking, storage management (private and public cloud), data centre networking services and data warehousing.

The partner will also be expected to collaborate and integrate with the Department’s Service Integration and Management (SIAM) partner, digital services delivery teams, and other service partners.

With this tender, the Department aims to establish scalable services within a performance framework; integrate and leverage automation and Artificial Intelligence to enhance, modernise, future-proof and make more efficient the Department’s enterprise compute; and align EC services with Axelos ITIL 4 Edition principles and support the Department’s broader risk, compliance, and governance objectives.

The Department’s current EC Services are delivered under a whole-of-ICT outsourcing arrangement, primarily through a contract with the incumbent service provider Datacom. This arrangement encompasses a broad spectrum of ICT services, including computing, storage, networks, end-user devices, IT service desk, application support, and Service Management.

Currently, there are two data centres housing all EC on-premises systems, with 135 physical servers supporting ~45 key business services. ~2300 virtual machines run on the VMware private cloud platform, which is located within the CBR1 and CBR2 data centres and provided as-a-Service by the current EC service partner.

There are currently ~71 AWS accounts with one root account. In Azure, there are two tenancies: OFFICIAL and PROTECTED. There are currently ~50 Azure subscriptions existing in the OFFICIAL tenancy. Approximately ~500 on-prem VMware Virtual Desktops have been migrated to Azure Virtual Desktops in PROTECTED public cloud.

The Department has established a multi-cloud environment that supports a diverse range of workloads across AWS and Microsoft Azure. These tenancies are actively managed and have matured to include foundational landing zones, governance frameworks, and tagging standards. Public cloud services are leveraged for IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and increasingly for Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) and Function-as-a-Service (FaaS).

The Department has identified several limitations in its current EC Services model that it seeks to address through this procurement.

These limitations include some platforms approaching end of life with critical workloads operating under extended support and limited SLA coverage; a lack of sufficient technical resources required to support cloud modernisation projects; cost observability between public cloud and on-premises private cloud not being well aligned; version control and security patching for some legacy platforms requiring modernisation uplift to improve security posture; and gaps in cloud foundational architecture needing to be addressed.

The tender closes on 2 March 2026 at 2:00 pm (ACT Local Time).

Last year, the Department released tenders seeking a cyber security partner and a managed IT service desk provider, as well as quotations from suppliers to deliver a review of the Department's digital delivery model.