Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry

With the Taking Farmers to Market program, DAFF recognised it would need to deliver code to production multiple times a day. This would have broken its existing processes and technology platforms due to the traditional release cycles using on-premises infrastructure.  

DAFF identified the need to move to a flexible development model – to democratise the delivery of digital services such that it’s not just done centrally by a single IT team, but that it’s done all over the organisation by teams of digital professionals. And this required being able to automate the provision of a dev environment, a test environment, a pre-production environment and even a production environment for end-to-end service delivery and providing as much autonomy as possible to their digital development teams. 

To achieve this DAFF identified the need to move to cloud infrastructure which would allow automated provisioning of services, and which also needed to be robust, scalable and secure. 

In partnership with DAFF, LAB³ implemented a technology environment dubbed Azure Platform One (APO) within months of commencing the engagement. 

To do so, LAB³ Bedrock was used which is an automated deployment of a Microsoft Azure platform built with the Terraform infrastructure-as-code software tool. 

The APO was built with agile delivery at the forefront and security by design. APO enables DAFF to operate in a cloud-first world – quickly, extensively and securely. 

APO is designed to scale because of the repeatability inherent with automation. It’s also compliant with government requirements; security measures are built-in; and these are consistent with meeting the Infosec Registered Assessors Program and ISO 27001 cybersecurity standards.  

With automation, DAFF can quickly develop and evolve modern apps on a cloud platform given innovation here is easier and more affordable.  

Once the APO was built, DAFF was in a unique position to go ahead and develop and deliver world-leading services for the agriculture industry. In a matter of weeks, the first application developed and deployed on APO was a certificate scanner that allowed importers and customs officials to validate the QR codes printed on export certificates.