About

Bentleys Queensland is a full service advisory firm helping ambitious people and enterprises get where they want to be. Proudly Queensland owned and managed, Bentleys Queensland has been servicing clients both locally and across the globe for more than 70 years.

Bentleys have a strong footprint with more than 170 professionals across Brisbane, the Sunshine Coast, and Emerald.

Bentleys offer a full range of integrated business advisory, accounting and audit services, including, but not limited to:

• Advisory services to help your business grow
• HR expertise and solutions to support you in your role as an employer
• Specialist tax advice, including R&D tax incentive solutions to reward innovation
• Superannuation and wealth management advice to protect your financial future
• Award winning finance and banking support to ensure you are accessing the most competitive finance in the market.

Challenges

To meet its growing business demands, Bentleys Queensland recognised the need to modernise its Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) infrastructure so that it could deliver better customer experience, improve operational efficiency and reduce infrastructure costs.

One of the critical objectives of Bentleys’ ICT modernisation strategy is to migrate from its on-premises infrastructure to a cloud solution. Some of the key drivers are as follows:

• Lack of an agile, flexible, scalable and secured ICT infrastructure
• Increased business demands, customer requirements and queries
• Need to shift from CAPEX to OPEX to allow more predictable budgeting as well as cost alignment with business demands.

Solution

Bentleys Queensland’s longstanding relationship with Telstra is enabling them to work collaboratively with Telstra Purple, the largest Australian owned technology services business, to identify an appropriate solution to meet their demands. The engagement is being undertaken in three (3) clear phases:

• Phase 1: High Level Design and Management of first workload (existing) via Telstra Purple Managed Cloud (Completed)
  
• Phase 2: Low Level Design / Migration Plan / Validated costs (in progress)
  
• Phase 3: VMC Migration (TBC late 2021 – details below).

Understanding Bentleys requirements, Telstra Purple chose and will assist them with a VMware Cloud (VMC) on AWS (Amazon Web Services) migration from their on-premises infrastructure. Telstra Purple will deploy VMC on AWS which is the most mature Hybrid Cloud Solution that best suites Bentleys' requirements.

The solution will consist of the VMware Software Defined Data Centres (SDDC) software suite overlaying over AWS bare metal infrastructure. This will provide the best of both worlds, allowing for an on-premises like experience on cloud. Some of the features of the solution will include:

• Securely built environment built as per VMware Validated Design (VVD) delivered via automation
• Seamless migration of workloads (VMware to VMware) without having to re-IP address workloads or refactor the virtual machines
• Dynamic scalability delivered via an OPEX cost model
• Access that is close and easy in AWS to Cloud Native Services
• Ability to transfer VMware skills.
  

Benefits

Upon final implementation, Telstra Purple’s newly implemented solution will deliver flexibility and scalability helping Bentleys Queensland improve its operational efficiency, reduce costs, increase agility/scalability and provide a better customer experience.
With their experience and expertise, Telstra Purple will deliver an end-to-end solution that addresses the business requirements at present and will adapt to meet their needs in the future as well. It will also deliver a comprehensive cloud solution and provide the organisation with process improvements, training, and reference architectures.

Telstra Purple brings in their deep knowledge of solution architecture, AWS infrastructure, application development and DevOps to modernise this area of operations and prepare it for future expansion and upgrades. The solution delivered is automated which reduces risks and deployment time while maximising quality.

Additionally, the solution will allow the organisation to transition from CAPEX to OPEX without radically changing the technology landscape that is familiar to its staff. As applications are modernised within their environment, application-level resiliency could be introduced, thereby, reducing the dependence on hardware or third-party software.

Some of the outcomes are as follows:

• Transitional access to Cloud Native Services allowing them to transform and modernise applications and workloads
  
• Resiliency and availability options to meet business and regulatory requirements
  
• Ability to leverage existing in-house ICT skills ensuring there is no significant skills uplift which can be both time consuming and creates a risk to the business.