Adelaide Festival Centre

The Adelaide Festival Centre is South Australia’s principal performing arts venue and presenter of dance, theatre, music and exhibitions. In its capacity as a leading Asia Pacific cultural centre the venue hosts four international shows a year, puts on 1,800 events, and attracts over a million patrons annually to contribute $160 million to the South Australian economy.

As part of its $90 million five-year redevelopment program to liven up the Adelaide Festival Centre, there was an opportunity to conduct a major redevelopment of the IT infrastructure to expand the venue’s online and onsite capabilities. This IT refresh would involve the demolition of the centre’s data centre environment, making Adelaide Festival Centre one of the first state government agencies in Australia to move 100 per cent of its servers to the cloud.

Adelaide Festival Centre needed to:

• Create a new data centre solution
• Modernise existing IT infrastructure to provide the capacity needed to scale up and down operations to satisfy user demand
• Replace outdated legacy systems
• Remain compliant within the budget, funded by government and private contributions

Through an integrated approach, Optus Business and Ensyst moved Adelaide Festival Centre to a hybrid cloud environment in one of the world’s first deployments of Microsoft’s Azure Linux to the cloud.

In another first, Adelaide Festival Centre’s move to the cloud was the first time a government agency in South Australia had moved 100 per cent of its servers to the cloud.

For Adelaide Festival Centre, the move to a hybrid cloud architecture was driven by three core components:

• Create a more agile workforce
• Lower risk and IT costs
• Replicate on-premise capabilities in the cloud