Truis digitalises Central Highlands Regional Council systems with Nutanix

Brisbane-based MSP Truis has rolled out Nutanix Cloud Platform to digitally transform community services for Central Highlands Regional Council in Central Queensland.

The solution was designed and implemented to support the council’s field workers operating in remote areas, servicing the region’s 30,000 residents across 60,000 square kilometres.

The council’s goal was to align its systems with its ethos of becoming a progressive region, creating opportunities for all, it said in a statement.

“Our council area is almost the size of Tasmania, and this means our workers can spend a lot of time on the road or in isolated areas – often in areas prone to connectivity issues,” said Central Highlands Regional Council information communication technology manager Clinton Nicol-Dickson. 

By overhauling its IT infrastructure, the project helped the council improve mobility and give its crews resources to manage and respond to citizen requests while out in the field. 

It has meant the small, regional IT team has reduced time spent “keeping the lights on” and allowed it to focus on helping workers overcome the isolation of working in remote areas. 

So far, it has deployed signal boosters for vehicle connectivity and rolled out a shared device scheme on iOS tablets.

“While the tablets grant easy access to work emails, intranet and ERP systems, the strategy also supports the welfare of our 150 field workers, side-stepping issues of isolation with access to personal applications, including online banking and communications platforms to stay in touch with friends and family,” Nicol-Dickson said.

The council established a managed services agreement with Truis to help Nicol-Dickson and his team “do more with less.”

“The goal was to lift IT from being the organisation’s sandbag, and actually demand more from it,” added Nicol-Dickson. 

“We have a fairly well-established Azure tenant – particularly around backup – but we’re continuing to evaluate cloud services when replacing existing solutions as part of our strategy. That was another appeal of Nutanix, it could interact with those cloud environments and make the process of migrating a VM seamless and less resource intensive.”

Truis identified the Nutanix Cloud Platform as a solution to the council’s needs.

“Truis provided us with the technical expertise to migrate our systems to Nutanix without any disruption,” Nicol-Dickson said. 

“We’ve worked with Truis in the past and have developed a really strong, trusted relationship because they go above-and-beyond in the levels of service they offer and their commitment to our success.”

Deployed within two months, the implementation leverages Nutanix’s AHV hypervisor, Prism Central centralised management platform, and Files software-defined storage for data management and analytics.

“Implementing an invisible layer of technology that automates new workloads and reduces human intervention in low-level processes, means we don’t have to worry about just keeping the lights on anymore,” said Nicol-Dickson.  

“We’ve actually cut down administrative tasks by 25 percent, giving staff the bandwidth for more strategic projects, all the while slashing data centre footprint by 50 percent. Streamlining the many processes involved with property development is just one example of how we’re digitalising services to improve touch-points and our residents’ way of life.”