Federal agency cloud migration to protected Azure

The Challenge

A federal government department responsible for national infrastructure programs was running critical workloads across three agencies on ageing on-premise hardware. The infrastructure was approaching end-of-life, disaster recovery capabilities were limited (RTO of 24+ hours), and the department faced increasing pressure to meet the Australian Government's cloud-first policy.

The migration needed to maintain IRAP compliance throughout, ensure zero downtime for citizen-facing services, and consolidate three separate IT environments into a unified, governable platform — all within a fixed budget and 12-month timeline.

Our Approach

• Conducted a comprehensive discovery across all three agencies — cataloguing 200+ workloads, mapping dependencies, and classifying data sensitivity levels
• Designed an Azure Protected landing zone with hub-spoke network topology, compliant with PSPF and ISM controls
• Built an IRAP compliance matrix mapping every control to Azure-native services and compensating controls
• Developed a phased migration plan with wave-based scheduling, automated rollback procedures, and parallel-run validation
• Delivered Infrastructure as Code (Terraform and Bicep) for repeatable, auditable deployments
• Upskilled internal teams through hands-on workshops, documentation, and shadowing during migration waves

The Solution

We delivered a fully IRAP-assessed Azure Protected environment with centralised identity governance (Azure AD with conditional access), automated compliance monitoring, and a unified management plane across all three agencies. The architecture included geo-redundant storage, automated backup with 4-hour RPO, and disaster recovery with a 2-hour RTO — down from the previous 24+ hours.

Cost optimisation was built into the architecture from day one: reserved instances for predictable workloads, auto-scaling for variable demand, and a FinOps governance framework to maintain discipline post-migration.

Results & Impact

• 35% reduction in infrastructure costs in the first year
• Disaster recovery improved from 24+ hours RTO to under 2 hours
• Full IRAP compliance maintained throughout migration — zero audit findings
• Developer deployment velocity increased 3x with Infrastructure as Code pipelines
• Unified security posture across all three agencies for the first time