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The government agency responsible for regulating Australia’s offshore oil and gas industry is on the hunt for a new IT services provider to manage its on-premise, Azure based infrastructure and desktop environment.
The National Offshore Petroleum Titles Administrator (NOPTA) has issued a tender for Microsoft Azure specialists to manage its recently-migrated core systems over a three-year period.
In addition to the cloud services, the winning provider will also oversee the body's physical infrastructure, including network management services, data link, wireless network, security management and back-up services, among others.
Desktop and helpdesk support will also be a requirement of the contract.
The agency, which is part of the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, spent the last year migrating a bulk of its IT infrastructure from office equipment and external data centres to the Azure cloud platform.
As such, the regulator’s entire suite of Microsoft products now operate in an infrastructure-as-a-service environment, while its non-Microsoft applications are expected to be migrated to Azure over the next few months.
NOPTA now operates minimal on-premise infrastructure, which encompasses firewalls, telephony and wireless access equipment.
It currently works with Nextgen Networks, which handles underlying telecommunications carriage services.
The body previously worked with an unnamed services provider whose contract is due to expire in June this year.
According to tender documents, the provider will also need to give ongoing advice on improving NOPTA’s current IT environment as the technology evolves, as well as general management provision.
Founded in 2012, NOPTA currently operates offices in Perth and Melbourne, and employs roughly 70 staff and sub-contractors across Australia.
The body handles digital assets both internally-generated and sourced externally from the petroleum industry, ranging from kilobytes to terabytes in size, and with all files stored in Azure for staff to access remotely.
The closing date for the tender is February 25.
