WA Health hybrid cloud shift picks up pace with Microsoft Office 365 transition

Western Australia’s Health Support Services (HSS) has announced it will be transitioning its 500 sites to Microsoft Office 365, as part of its state-wide hybrid cloud shift.

According to a blog post from Microsoft, the solution is currently being piloted, with the intent to roll it out to HSS’ 45,000 staff by mid-2020.

HSS is the WA health system’s shared services provider delivering connectivity, central compute and storage, and application support for all of WA Health. The team also leads on cybersecurity issues for the agency.

The Microsoft transition is taking place alongside WA Health’s hybrid cloud shift, with HSS in March signing a AU$124 million, five year deal with Atos to transition the current legacy infrastructure.

“Our model for the future of compute and storage is going to be hybrid cloud, with the majority probably in private cloud, and increasing over the coming years in managed public cloud services,” HSS CIO Holger Kaufmann said in Microsoft’s blog post.

The transition to the cloud is taking place alongside an overhaul of the wide area network that connects WA Health’s 500…