Interactive keeps City of Port Phillips operating in the cloud

Interactive has helped the City of Port Phillip through a digital transformation — migrating the council’s legacy systems from a heritage-listed site to a secure, scalable cloud environment.

Situated in Melbourne Victoria, the City of Port Phillip has faced several challenges maintaining IT infrastructure within the physical limitations of a 100-year-old building.

When a critical environmental risk was found in the council’s on-premises server room, just metres from mission-critical racks, Port Phillip’s IT leadership recognised an urgent need to modernise.

The City of Port Phillip was looking for a solution, all while knowing structural changes were not an option. This was because if the city’s racks went down, its operations – including more than 100 community services – would be brought to a standstill.

Interactive delivered a two-phased migration strategy that combined speed, stability and forward-looking design.

Over a three-month period — Interactive relocated the council’s systems to a secure colocation facility, completing the migration over weekends to ensure no interruption to public-facing services.

Interactive was on call for hands-on troubleshooting, including rapid response to unexpected challenges.

Interactive account executive David Forrest said the project is a blueprint for how local government can embrace digital transformation under pressure.

When a core network switch failed late at night during the migration, Interactive had a replacement sourced, configured and operational within hours, maintaining critical business continuity.

“The City of Port Phillip has shown proactivity and leadership,” he said. “Despite the complexity and constraints, they made bold decisions that prioritised service continuity and long-term resilience.

Following the rapid migration, Interactive supported key infrastructure upgrades to bolster resilience and future scalability.

This included uplifting disaster recovery services, the rollout of NetApp Keystone storage with full managed services and implementation of 24/7 monitoring and incident response.

The result of the digital transformation for the City of Port Phillip saw a dramatic drop in major outages, with feedback from teams citing faster application speeds and more responsive systems.

In addition, Interactive helped improve the security posture, removing end-of-life hardware and implementing network security on firewalls.

The Interactive team operates as more than just a data centre provider, more like a true one-stop shop across networking, hardware, cloud, support and project management.