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Australia's Horizon Power moves workloads to private cloud in Macquarie data center

Energy company signs deal with Macquarie Telecom Group to transition workloads and reduce data center footprint.

The power company signed a deal with Macquarie Telecom and Macquarie Cloud Services in order to move to a private cloud environment, and thus reduce its data center footprint, a process which has taken the company six months to complete. Jeff Campbell, senior manager of technology at Horizon power said that the move is part of the company’s desire to provide a ‘cleaner’ service to its customers. The state government has a carbon emissions reduction target of 80 percent by 2030, and it is hoped that the use of a cloud provider will help Horizon reach this.

“To achieve the target, we are looking at how to build more digital and IoT-related services and remove the cost and complexity of managing servers, server clusters, storage devices, and backup processes,” Campbell said. “This will ultimately allow us to reduce our data center footprint and corresponding energy consumption.”

Macquarie was selected due to its ability to manage the operating technology and industrial controls system needed by Horizon, as well as the reassurance of data sovereignty that the cloud provider offers.

Horizon is looking to add a new set of advanced tools to its daily functioning, all of which will be supported by Macquarie.

“We’re introducing technologies that provide condition-based monitoring, such as Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) drones and IoT sensors. This allows us to capture and crunch data so we can make assets more efficient. For instance, we can send field staff only to the assets requiring maintenance or get detailed data to provide better services and products for customers in specific areas,” Campbell said.

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