Zero downtime, speed to market and highly secure — our journey to the cloud
In 2019 Technology circles, having a ‘cloud first’ strategy has become pretty standard. Everyone from banks to universities are turning to the cloud to manage their data and operations as the benefits — zero downtime, increased speed to market and highly secure — are reducing the heavy lifting required with some on premise solutions.
But tech trends aside, most companies are making the shift for one important reason, and Transurban is no different.
Cloud platforms make it easier and faster to improve your customer experience
Back in 2015, our customers began asking for a digital experience that matched their experience on our roads. At that point, our technology wasn’t set up in a way that we could make any major improvements at scale.
So we asked the question — who is the Transurban customer? Although 1.5 million cars use our roads every day across Australia, we actually needed to design this for the people who were driving.
Looking at industry trends, we knew that we needed a solution that would set us up for scale. Every day, we generate terabytes worth of data from road conditions to traffic patterns to customer usage and behavior. Even if we didn’t leverage everything up front, there were plenty of opportunities to use that data to improve the experience for our customers and improve our business overall.
The challenge was how to leverage these large volumes of data and building new digital products without impacting delivery of the existing technology program. To make this happen, we chose the AWS platform and partnered with Versent.
Getting started
Our team in the US were already experimenting with AWS so we were able to move quickly. Our vision of making it easier for customers at the front end, required a back end that supported our ambition to not only move to cloud, but run multiple implementations in parallel. Versent helped us to build our Enterprise Cloud Platform on AWS, so we could quickly create high quality and secure infrastructure and start demonstrating value back to the business.
This shift wasn’t just about a new technology platform. It required an entirely new way of working based on Agile principles. The team decided to take a DevOps approach to delivering not only infrastructure, but end to end platform solutions on cloud platforms. By blending infrastructure provisioning, security, operations, software development and customer features into the one delivery train, the team could deliver customer solutions rapidly, securely and at high availability.
With a strong focus on automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) from the beginning, in 2016 the team established a secure foundational cloud platform in only a few months. At the same time, we set up product delivery streams to enable Transurban’s digital experience mobile apps and web brand refreshes. This simultaneous delivery approach paid off with the first public go-live of our web platform taking place only four months after we started. A month later we launched our data analytics capability a month later and later that year, our first mobile app.
Tipping point
Within the first year of launching our enterprise cloud platform, we were delivering new consumer-facing content and products, faster and to a higher quality than ever before. More importantly, we did this while making sure that core applications remained online. In three short years, we’ve been able to deliver customer and enterprise platforms at a rapid pace, building on top of automated patterns at a greater scale.
Some key achievements have included:
- Launched our Linkt retail digital experience in Australia, across mobile apps and web hosting
- Launched LinktGO in Australia — our GPS based account-less tolling application utilising cloud based platforms
- Established an enterprise data analytics platform enabling our traffic and assets teams to better forecast and analyse
- Enabled VMWare on AWS, enabling us to seamlessly move our infrastructure to the cloud.
Looking to the future
Transurban is in the unique position of planning, building and operating tolling assets on a global scale. One of the benefits of this model is that we understand what Technology is required to run our roads safely and efficiently. By doing this with an internal technology function, we have the capability on hand to build bespoke solutions where the current market offering doesn’t meet our needs.
Our next generation tolling platform is a great example of this. Tolling is central to what we do as a business, but as we grow, we need a platform that will continue to provide outstanding levels of service to our customers. To address this, we are building a next generation tolling platform natively on AWS to reap the efficiencies and scale of the cloud with a federated services architecture. We are expanding our retail tolling apps in new markets, achieving scale through automation and cloud serverless products.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are the next phase of our journey. Traffic forecasting is hugely important to our business, and AWS will support us in finding ways to scale our current operations and leverage the data we have even more effectively.
You could say AWS is driving change across our business — an apt description in a business like ours.
We’re hiring!
We’re looking for our next Head of Cloud and Digital to support the strategic evolution of Transurban Technology through both enhancing and innovating products.
tl;dr
Our journey to using cloud based platforms; for the terabytes worth of data we generate everyday, in just four short years.
