As Auckland Council gears up for hybrid cloud it’s worth taking a quick look back to understand how they’re moving forward.

In 2014 Council selected Revera to deliver an IaaS platform to replace 11 council-operated data centres and consolidate eight IT teams.

The move to IaaS also paved the way for a consolidation programme spanning applications and data, which at that time amounted to approximately 1,400 VMs and 1 PB respectively.

With its new as-a-service foundations in place, Council set its sights on bigger plays, which Auckland Council director of IT Mark Denvir outlined in a recent article, titled Inside Auckland Council's emerging ICT strategy and roadmap in Reseller News.

Council’s strategy includes significant strategic and operational shifts in how ICT will be managed and delivered, including new technologies to enable hybrid cloud and the delivery of intelligence to the edge to improve services to customers.

As well as employing containerisation to make workloads movable in a hybrid cloud environment, Council has adopted VMware's Workspace One to enable the delivery of browser-based services on any device.

Moving to hybrid cloud means, or even requires, Council to start to containerise its workloads to be able to move them to the most appropriate infrastructure: IaaS or cloud.

On this front, Council has inked an agreement with Revera to help it begin that transition, allowing it to use the benefits of the All of Government agreement and also take advantage of "pure-play" cloud providers.

Denvir said the first phase of that was already underway and had delivered some reasonable cost savings. Revera's CloudCreator orchestration platform will be used, he said.

"We will be going into co-design to see what the future environment will look like," he explained. "We are not closing down any opportunities. We are looking. We are doing that with Revera."

Other cloud-based opportunities are also being embraced, including a shift to Office 365 from Exchange.