Govt seeks cloud hosting for federal legislation register

The Office of the Parliamentary Counsel has released a tender for cloud hosting services to support Australia's authoritative legislation online source, as part of a technological upgrade for the critical government platform.

The tender seeks a provider to host the Federal Register of Legislation (FRL) website and associated services.

It contains the only database of Australian Government legislation that is authoritative for legal proceedings.

The scope includes hosting the public-facing legislation.gov.au website that serves over 10,000 users, with peak traffic reaching 55.3 requests per second during busy periods.

Over 70 separate agencies contribute content to the Register, which serves the legal community and general public.

The platform must handle several thousand emails per day and maintain seven years of searchable logs for compliance purposes.

A successful provider must deliver 99.95 per cent system availability during business hours and 99.50 per cent availability outside business hours for the production environment.  

On top of that, managed services covering security monitoring, system updates, and technical support, with incident response and with 24/7 availability and strict service level agreements (SLAs) are required.

Infrastructure provided must meet Australian government cybersecurity requirements, including compliance with the Australian Signals Directorate’s Information Security Manual (ISM)

The solution requires hosting three key websites - the public legislation portal, a lodgement site for government agencies, and a management interface for staff.

These must be supported by robust database, search and queuing capabilities.

Critical security requirements include two-factor authentication for developers, compliance with the Australian Signals Directorate Information Security Manual, and current IRAP certification for the environment.

The tender documentation showed the scale of the platform, with the production database expected to be approximately 1.4 terabytes at go-live, having grown by around 700 gigabytes over the past five years.

The deadline for the new provider to complete the cloud hosting solution design is May 9 2025, with final go-live in the production environment scheduled for 31 August 2025.