AWS Public Sector Blog
How AWS Managed Services helps Australian public sector organizations optimize their cloud operations
After migrating to cloud, organizations shift their focus to maintaining application stability and improving operational efficiency while transforming their operating model and adapting to the organizational changes. Managing cloud operations can take up time that could otherwise be dedicated to delivering value to citizens.
Some of the key operational challenges customers face after their cloud migration include:
- Addressing organizational challenges: Overcoming skill gaps, workforce constraints preventing on-call rostering, and misaligned operations processes that impede effective cloud operations. This involves creating targeted training programs for existing staff, establishing a cloud center of excellence, and fostering a culture that embraces cloud-native approaches to problem-solving.
- Managing cloud finances: Keeping cloud costs optimized, aligned with initial budgets through proper planning and financial practices that embrace the shift of IT spending from CapEx to OpEx. This includes defining cloud specific cost policies, cost monitoring setup, establishing roles and responsibilities, and regularly reviewing spending patterns to identify cost optimization avenues.
- Optimizing security and compliance: Verifying the solutions deployed to the cloud align with internal security policies and Australian security standards and guidelines such as Cyber Security Strategy, Information Security Manual (ISM), Essential 8, and others. This encompasses implementing security controls tailored to the cloud environment that focus on preventing, detecting, and remediating security issues, and establishing a well-defined incident response process.
- Establishing scalable cloud operations: Implementing automation to avoid the challenge of scaling operations solely through manual efforts. This requires developing reusable patterns and templates, creating self-service capabilities, implementing robust CI/CD pipelines, utilizing cloud-native monitoring solutions, and designing systems that can automatically respond to operational events without manual intervention.
To help you address these challenges, AWS Support offers AWS Managed Services (AMS) Accelerate, an operations support plan that provides a range of operational services to help you achieve operational excellence on Amazon Web Services (AWS). AMS Accelerate extends your existing teams with both automated and operations engineer-involved operational capabilities—so you can operate on AWS efficiently, securely, and at scale.
The key capabilities of AMS Accelerate that focus on addressing your operational challenges include:
Designated operations experts
AMS Accelerate designates a cloud service delivery manager (CSDM) and a cloud architect (CA) to engage with your cloud operations stakeholders and drive operational and security excellence. The CSDM functions as your guide into operating in the cloud, they understand best practices, have experience working with multiple customers, and can support your transformation. The CA is a technical expert, helping you implement operations optimization mechanisms and solutions.
Monitoring and Incident management
AMS Accelerate deploys and monitors Amazon CloudWatch events and alarms round the clock to detect performance and availability issues. AMS Accelerate proactively detects and responds to incidents and assists your team in resolving issues through hands-on-keyboard support as needed.
Security management
AMS Accelerate protects your resources and helps keep your AWS infrastructure secure by using multiple controls, including AWS Config rules and Amazon GuardDuty. AMS Accelerate continuously monitors GuardDuty findings to identify potentially unauthorized or malicious activity in your AWS environment. AMS Accelerate maintains a library of AWS Config rules and remediation actions enabling your accounts to comply with industry standards for security and operational integrity.
Patch management
AMS Accelerate helps you to maintain patch compliance and provides visibility and governance around patching status and resources missing patches. AMS Accelerate applies and installs vendor updates to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances for supported operating systems during your chosen maintenance windows through AWS Systems Manager Patch Manager. AMS operations engineers investigate patch failures and recommend a course of action to remediate the issue.
Backup and restoration
AMS Accelerate helps you regularly back up critical information and assists with a timely recovery using AWS Backup. You define the backup schedules, frequency, and retention period, and AMS Accelerate monitors all backup jobs and resolves any issues.
Cost optimization
AMS Accelerate uses automated mechanisms such as AMS Resource Scheduler and Trusted Remediator to help optimize your AWS spend. Additionally, your AMS Accelerate CSDM provides monthly recommendations to optimize your AWS usage and cost. With your approval, our team of cloud experts will make required infrastructure changes either through automation or manually to achieve the optimization outcomes.
Logging and reporting
AMS Accelerate aggregates and stores logs generated by your AWS resources in Amazon CloudWatch, AWS CloudTrail, and VPC Flow Logs for faster issue resolution and system audits. The CSDM delivers a monthly service report summarizing the key performance metrics of AMS Accelerate operations. The report begins with an executive summary and provides insights and metrics on operations, service level agreement (SLA) adherence, and spending, savings, and cost optimization.
AMS Operations on Demand (OOD)
AMS offers OOD service in addition to Accelerate through which you can request additional operations scope of work from a comprehensive catalog of operations services—including ongoing management of building and vending Amazon Machine Images (AMI), AWS Network Firewall operations, and more. The services are delivered by a combination of automation and highly skilled AMS engineers.
Optimizing operations in a phased approach
AMS Accelerate follows a structured cyclic approach after setup and configuration to drive operations optimization. The four steps of operations optimization with AMS Accelerate include: setup and configure, identify and present, agree and optimize, and measure and report.
Phase 1 – Setup & Configure
The first step in the operational excellence journey with AMS Accelerate is to onboard the service to your AWS accounts. AMS Accelerate will be set up with the default configurations and then customized to your operations requirements. After onboarding, you can start using AMS Accelerate capabilities and operations automation. This step typically takes 2–3 weeks, depending on the number of AWS accounts targeted for onboarding.
Phase 2 – Identify & Present
After AMS Accelerate is onboarded to your AWS accounts, the AMS Accelerate operations team will have visibility into the security, cost, and operations posture of your AWS accounts. During this step, AMS team will perform deeper analysis through automation and predefined playbooks to identify operational optimization avenues and potential impact of the changes. Based on the findings, CSDMs and CAs will present recommendations to seek approvals for performing the recommended changes.
Phase 3 – Agree & Optimize
The next step is for you to review and approve the cost optimization specific changes, after which the AMS team will work closely with your stakeholders—including the application teams—to implement the changes. AMS Accelerate uses the change windows provided to perform the change. Application teams conduct the post validation testing after the change and will work with the AMS team if there are any issues that need resolution.
Phase 4 – Measure & Report
In the final step, the CSDM continually monitors the optimization implementation and regularly reports the outcomes to your stakeholders and teams. This provides you with visibility into the optimization work and the yielded results.
As AMS Accelerate engages in day-to-day operations, the automated mechanisms that were deployed provide continuous feedback on ways to optimize operations. This will initiate the identification of optimization avenues triggering the rest of the steps. This approach fosters a culture of continuous optimization without being tactical with one-time optimization exercises.
The following graphic illustrates these phases.
Figure 1: AMS Accelerate phased approach to drive operational excellence
Delivering operational excellence to ANZ public sector agencies
AMS Accelerate engaged with multiple Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) public sector agencies across various departments, including education, transport, and other customer service-related state organizations. Working with AMS Accelerate to run their operations on AWS improved their efficiency.
A few examples of outcomes delivered for the agencies include:
- Working with one of the premier universities in New South Wales (NSW), AMS Accelerate delivered cloud security and optimization solutions that meet regulatory standards. The collaboration achieved over 95% vulnerability compliance, surpassing Essential 8 cybersecurity framework requirements, while maintaining 99.5% backup coverage to ensure robust data protection and business continuity. Through strategic AWS cloud spend optimization, AMS Accelerate delivered a 5% cost reduction for 2024, demonstrating its capability to enhance security posture while maintaining operational excellence and cost efficiency for large-scale educational institutions.
- A key NSW government agency enhanced its cloud infrastructure by implementing Landing Zone Accelerator on AWS, which established a secure foundation with tagging policies, observability dashboards, and automation frameworks. The agency also adopted AMS Accelerate, enabling automated security incident remediation, streamlined patching, and around-the-clock infrastructure monitoring. This modernization significantly reduced operational overhead, freeing up internal teams to redirect their focus toward developing services that better serve NSW citizens.
- Another public sector university in Western Australia that onboarded AMS Accelerate in 2024 achieved 95.8% patch compliance, 97.6% backup coverage and delivered savings of 3.8% cost optimization. AMS Accelerate automation helped the customer save 653 hours of manual efforts involved in operations. In addition, the enhanced observability and reporting frameworks implemented by AMS Accelerate now enable the university to measure and track their organizational cloud maturity levels—addressing their previous visibility challenges.
- A public department in Western Australia uses AMS Accelerate security monitoring and alerting capabilities to proactively detect and respond to changes that affect its security posture. In addition, the department optimized 8.7% of its monthly Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) service costs through a pattern developed by AMS Accelerate that provided enhanced visibility of unused Amazon ECS tasks—enabling the department to decommission those unused ECS tasks.
Next steps
Successfully operating in the cloud requires a shift in tools, processes, and skills. AMS Accelerate can be a valuable service in your cloud operations journey by augmenting your existing teams with operational expertise, automation, and required support capabilities.
To get started with AWS Managed Services, contact your AWS account team or connect with AWS Support to learn how we can help you achieve your operational goals.