Local governments are the bedrock of communities, ensuring a city thrives as a great place to live. Delivering vital services, building and running infrastructure, and ensuring people have adequate access to essential and emergency services alike are some of the top priorities of local governments. In the continent nation of Australia, local governance is carried out through councils that form the third tier of the government and are led by elected officials on 3-4 year terms. Australian city councils manage community services, transportation, environmental issues, and health and safety, as well as engage with the community to make the cities safe and smart to live in.
 
Though city council IT stacks vary based on their size, budget, and maturity, a typical local government’s IT stack would include many or all of the following: a range of informational websites and citizen e-governance portals, office productivity apps, data storage, content management systems, and supporting networking hardware and software—all backed by cloud servers and disaster recovery backup systems. Some city councils may also run custom applications for specific needs, such as grievance redressal.

Australian IT governance is driven by various initiatives like the Digital Transformation Agency (DTA), the Australian Cyber Security Center (ACSC), and the Government of Australia’s IT architecture framework. However, IT architecture frameworks and policy decisions vary at the federal, state, and local government levels—with unique challenges faced in each. This blog seeks to list the IT challenges faced by local governance bodies in Australia and how they can be addressed using a modern IT observability platform to ensure consistent performance in all their digital activities.

In a digital-native world, accessing local governance websites, portals, applications, and networks from every corner of the jurisdiction area is expected as a norm. However, with shaky or patchy internet access in certain areas, some websites may not be accessible to all, impacting coverage. There is also a need for independently-hosted status communication pages in case of outages, which display the expected turnaround time.

Annual IT budgets are great for sustaining IT initiatives. However, they tend to accumulate a growing list of legacy IT hardware and software, largely due to recurring contracts and even inertia in decision-making. The result is an uneven IT landscape that renders itself hard to monitor, requiring trained personnel on capable platforms.

With increasing cloud adoption, city councils also grapple with managing a hybrid infrastructure that includes legacy applications. Australian local governance spent more than AUD 43 billion in 2020-21, according to the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA), with the largest city, Melbourne, spending upwards of AUD 780 million in 2023-24 on essential services. Diversified hybrid IT also demands a capable hybrid cloud monitoring suite.

With the migration to the cloud, more legacy IT owned and run by city councils is moving to the cloud, demanding cloud-native skills that encompass observability and cloud-cost management.

Data is often trapped in unconnected pools, leading to a failure to capitalize on the big picture. Only when data is viewed centrally can IT operations make the most of it by ensuring top operational efficiency and investing in creating the missing links in the system to make it all work as one.

One more reason for siloed operations is tool sprawl—the accumulation of a variety of IT tools, including monitoring solutions, gathered over years—leading to disparate handling, errors, and incompatibility.

All the above IT infrastructure challenges are litmus-tested by end-user experience—the last frontier. Local governance websites and applications are some of the most accessed web resources. IT teams running local governance should ensure that users can access them from multiple locations and on devices and networks, ensuring accessibility.

Local governance websites are more susceptible to hacking attempts than websites of larger organizations, either due to a lack of budget or processes. For example, the city of Oakland, California, suffered a ransomware attack in 2023 that took down several city services. When city council websites and several interlinked services are accessed on the web and apps, increased vigilance is the need of the hour, such as automated certificate renewals, which help ensure citizens’ data is safe and is accessed only as intended.

Like any other advanced nation, Australia’s IT is keeping pace with the world. In this journey, comprehensive monitoring is crucial for IT resilience, ensuring service reliability and access for all. Local governments that embrace cloud-native digital transformation with a centralized approach to IT management can break down silos, integrate tools, prioritize customer-centric services, and enhance cybersecurity to ensure a resilient, cost-effective IT infrastructure.

ManageEngine Site24x7 is a one-stop, all-inclusive IT monitoring suite for city government IT teams to adopt to ensure complete visibility into every layer of their IT stack while ensuring that citizens always have secure and highly available access to essential services.