Helping EnergyAustralia strengthen resilience through a complex data centre exit
At a glance
Cevo partnered with EnergyAustralia to migrate complex legacy Oracle platforms to AWS as part of a time-critical data centre exit program. The project maintained continuity for critical operations, improved disaster recovery failover capability to approximately 30 seconds, and established a more resilient, scalable platform to support EnergyAustralia’s ongoing transformation.
Capabilities
Industry
Energy & Utilities
About EnergyAustralia
EnergyAustralia is one of Australia’s leading energy retailers and generators, supplying electricity and gas to residential and business customers across the country. The organisation operates complex technology environments that support customer operations, billing, energy management and market participation, requiring high levels of reliability, performance, governance and security.
Business challenge
EnergyAustralia had already migrated many workloads to the cloud, but some of its most complex and business-critical legacy systems remained on-premises. These included CC&B, which manages customer accounts and billing, and MDMS, which processes and stores energy usage data.
Both platforms were highly customised Oracle environments that had evolved over many years. They were tightly interconnected, supported critical customer and billing processes, and carried significant data volumes. Much of the knowledge about their configuration and behaviour was embedded in the systems and operational teams, rather than fully captured in documentation. This made analysis, replication and migration complex.
The complexity and scale of these systems meant confidence in the migration approach needed to be established before full-scale delivery could proceed.
At the same time, EnergyAustralia faced a fixed deadline to exit a legacy data centre environment. The migration needed to be completed prior to a key pricing and billing period where system continuity was essential.
The project also needed to improve disaster recovery. Existing recovery processes were largely manual and time-intensive, creating operational risk for systems that support customer and energy data processes. EnergyAustralia needed a solution that could improve resilience, meet business requirements and support future transformation.
Solution
Cevo worked with EnergyAustralia to migrate these critical legacy environments to AWS and support the organisation’s broader data centre exit program. The engagement formed part of a wider program that also included the transition of additional applications, network services and storage infrastructure, with the full data centre exit targeted for completion in July 2026.
Discovery and migration planning
Cevo built on earlier assessment work and reviewed the on-premises environment to understand dependencies, prioritise workloads and define the migration approach. Particular focus was placed on CC&B and MDMS because of their scale, customisation and importance to EnergyAustralia’s customer, billing and energy data operations.
Rather than using a standard migration model, Cevo and EnergyAustralia adopted an iterative, environment-by-environment approach. This helped reduce risk and maintain stability across environments with different configurations and dependencies.
Proof of concept
Cevo and EnergyAustralia developed a proof of concept to validate that the highly customised Oracle workloads could perform effectively in AWS. This helped validate the approach, test key design assumptions and build stakeholder confidence before full-scale migration began.
Landing zone and platform enablement
The solution was deployed into a new AWS landing zone using EnergyAustralia’s existing infrastructure-as-code approach, including Terraform and Azure DevOps. This helped align the migration with internal standards and supported consistent, repeatable environment provisioning.
As the landing zone was still being established, Cevo worked closely with EnergyAustralia to navigate evolving governance, platform requirements and delivery constraints while keeping the program moving.
Migration and implementation
Cevo migrated CC&B, MDMS and associated disaster recovery environments to AWS, while keeping critical integrations and business processes running throughout the transition.
The migration included 20 development, test, pre-production and production environments across CC&B and MDMS, each with its own integrations and dependencies. This required careful sequencing and close coordination across teams.
The project also involved significant data volumes exceeding 100TB. When MDMS data expanded substantially during decompression in the cloud, Cevo worked with EnergyAustralia’s project architecture team to redesign the storage approach and introduce optimised patterns that balanced performance and cost at scale.
Due to the transition to third-party Oracle support, the solution used a self-managed architecture on Amazon EC2 rather than managed database services. This supported compatibility with EnergyAustralia’s licensing arrangements while maintaining performance and operational control.
Resilience and disaster recovery uplift
Cevo implemented a new AWS-based disaster recovery capability, replacing largely manual recovery processes with automated failover. The new approach reduced failover time to approximately 30 seconds, a significant improvement compared to previous failover time. This gave EnergyAustralia a more resilient foundation for critical customer and billing systems.
Delivery and stakeholder collaboration
Cevo worked closely with EnergyAustralia’s engineering, architecture, security and program teams to manage dependencies and maintain alignment throughout the delivery. Knowledge transfer was built into the engagement, helping EnergyAustralia’s teams strengthen their AWS capability and take ownership of the platform after migration.
Outcomes
The project delivered significant improvements in resilience, operational capability and risk reduction for EnergyAustralia.
- Successful data centre exit milestone: EnergyAustralia and Cevo successfully migrated complex legacy workloads to AWS in line with a fixed data centre exit timeline.
- Improved disaster recovery performance: Automated failover capability reduced failover time to approximately 30 seconds, a significant improvement compared to previous failover time.
- Business continuity maintained: Critical systems, integrations and business processes remained operational throughout the migration.
- Large-scale migration completed: Cevo supported the migration of 20 environments across development, test, pre-production and production for CC&B and MDMS.
- Significant data volumes managed: The project involved more than 100TB of data, including a large MDMS dataset that expanded substantially when decompressed in the cloud and required storage architecture redesign.
- Cost impacts actively managed: Cevo and EnergyAustralia redesigned the storage approach to balance performance and cost, helping minimise a potentially prohibitive increase in cloud storage costs.
- Risk reduced: The migration reduced reliance on ageing data centre infrastructure and supported remediation of legacy technology risk.
- Operational efficiency improved: Automated, repeatable deployment and recovery processes reduced reliance on manual intervention and improved consistency.
- Internal capability strengthened: Cevo supported knowledge transfer across EnergyAustralia teams, helping them build confidence in the AWS environment and take ownership of the platform.
- Foundation for transformation created: The AWS-based environment gives EnergyAustralia a more resilient and scalable platform to support its broader transformation program.
What’s next
EnergyAustralia is continuing its broader transformation program, including the progressive transition away from legacy systems and infrastructure. The AWS-based environment provides a stable and resilient foundation for this next stage, supporting modernisation while helping maintain reliable operations for critical customer and energy data processes.
With improved disaster recovery, greater scalability and stronger internal AWS capability, EnergyAustralia is better positioned to continue its cloud transformation with confidence.
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