UniSuper 60 percent complete in cloud shift

UniSuper has completed 60 percent of its shift to the cloud as it continues with a broader digital transformation.

The superannuation fund has shifted almost all non-production workloads out of its data centres and into Google Cloud so far.

UniSuper used the Google VMware Engine (GCVE) managed service and engaged partner Kasna to assist with the migration.

Head of architecture Sam Cooper told iTnews the business has “a cloud presence in Microsoft Azure” and “manages hardware out of two data centres" in Port Melbourne and Mitcham, which is 26km to the east.

Cooper said the plan is to "effectively ... shift out of those data centres”.

“The key drawcard for us with moving to the model that we've moved to is it's on the VMware platform, which our team's already used to using," he said.

“It's on a lot of the technology that the team is familiar working with, with the Google engine underneath it.”

Cooper said the lift-and-shift to cloud will enable UniSuper to “scale our environment quickly” and “be able to meet any or support any future potential business growth opportunities or member value opportunities that might come in quickly.”

Cooper explained UniSuper recently completed its merge with Australian Catholic Superannuation, highlighting the company’s need to have upgraded infrastructure in place.

“We need to be able to leverage cloud providers to be able to do that quickly and be able to do it in a way that presents an appropriate risk mitigation for us," Cooper said, adding that using cloud meant "not having to order hardware from overseas and wait" due to ongoing supply chain delays.

"It's about being able to scale our environment within minutes rather than months.”

Cooper said the business selected Google after a tender process with three “large cloud providers”, ultimately finding it “supported the functionality that we needed to be able to continue to deliver what we needed to for our members.”

Cooper said the shift is “a key pillar of our scale and simplification strategy within technology”, with UniSuper recognising its “business strategy has shifted over the past couple of years”.

“Our business strategy has changed away from primarily being organic growth - so maintaining our members through the superannuation into pension phase - to being organic and also inorganic,” he said.

This has seen UniSuper looking to attract “more members from outside of the [higher education and research] industry” while “also looking for opportunities like the Australian Catholic Super [merger]”.

Early days

Despite over half the migration already complete, Cooper said “it's still early days” and the shift of workloads to the cloud is expected to be completed by September.

He said choosing to move non-production or test systems first to avoid disrupting live environments “served us really well”, leaving the team with “great” learnings as it shifts roughly 1900 virtual machines.

Cooper said that while UniSuper started migrating workloads in March, planning began in November last year.

“I’m excited about how we've implemented a solution here that provides the ability for the organisation to scale, but scale safely," he said.

“We're not moving to native cloud architecture that requires us to pull apart and rebuild applications - we're moving to something that gets us into the cloud really quickly and safely, and supports the overall business strategy.”

He added that “not all applications are ready for native cloud adoption.”

“Some of our significant applications are in that category and that's a big reason as well why we went for this as a solution," Cooper said.

“We don't want to be the ones to go and try and build applications in the cloud when our partners haven't done it before yet.

“This is a way to get us into the cloud safely, provide us the scalability that we need in the short term without having to disrupt the organisation.”