AWS accelerates digital innovation and economic growth in Victoria through new government agreement

The Whole-of-Government Agreement will now underpin the AWS State Purchase Contract (SPC), enabling Victorian Government agencies to access AWS’s world-class services and expertise while supporting state requirements and policies. The new SPC is available at buyingfor.vic.gov.au.

Under this enhanced collaboration, Victorian Government departments and entities gain streamlined access to over 240 AWS cloud services, including cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI), security, and quantum technologies, where 164 of these services are now assessed at the PROTECTED level under the Infosec Registered Assessors Program (IRAP). Our comprehensive suite of services will drive innovation, efficiency, and digital transformation across the Victorian public sector while supporting the state's economic prosperity. 

AWS has made continued investments in Victoria to support the state’s digital transformation. In 2023, AWS launched a second infrastructure Region in Australia, located in Melbourne, bringing compute, storage, AI, and machine learning closer to even more customers, and delivering lower network latency while meeting local data-residency requirements. This year, we built on our national commitments with a new AU$20 billion investment into Australia to expand our infrastructure. To support this, Amazon is investing in three new solar farms in Victoria and Queensland, with a combined capacity of more than 170-megawatts (MW). Together with eight existing solar and wind projects across New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria, these 11 renewable energy projects are estimated to generate more than 1.4 million megawatt hours of carbon-free energy annually, enough to power approximately 290,000 Australian homes each year.

"AWS's significant investment in Victoria demonstrates strong confidence in our state's digital future - it will create jobs, drive innovation, and strengthen Victoria's position as a leading technology hub,” said Minister for Economic Growth and Jobs, Danny Pearson stated.

The combination of multiple AWS Regions (Melbourne and Sydney) in Australia allows customers to deliver extremely high resilience applications. Critical communication systems like VicTraffic leverage AWS's multi-region architecture to ensure continuous operation during emergencies. Processing data from over 50 different sources through a fully serverless microservices architecture, these systems maintain strict recovery requirements of less than one hour, with even more stringent standards during high-risk flood and bushfire seasons to dynamically balance risk and cost of IT. This ensures Victorians receive timely, reliable emergency information when they need it most, while keeping costs to a minimum. 

The Coroners Court of Victoria has also collaborated with AWS to take advantage of the transformative potential of AI in Victoria’s justice system. Leveraging Amazon Bedrock, a prototype was developed to help address immediate needs, while also establishing a pathway for broader judicial innovation using AI.

"Working with AWS has been exceptional,” said Judge Cain, State Coroner of Victoria. “They demonstrated genuine understanding of our unique challenges in balancing technological innovation with judicial responsibility. Their team's expertise in developing a bespoke and secure AI solution will enable us to create efficiencies and pioneer trauma-reduction technology that could transform how courts protect their workforce whilst delivering justice for Victorian families."

Secure Electronic Registries Victoria (SERV) administers the 160-year-old government-owned Victorian Register of Land, processing up to 1 million land transactions annually. With digital lodgments growing from 50 percent in 2018 to close to 100 percent in 2024, AWS worked with SERV to redesign the land registry systems to improve reliability. The new highly scalable, serverless architecture on AWS has helped SERV decrease performance issues by 50 percent, improve system reliability to 99.99 percent, and fast-track system upgrades in weeks instead of months.

To ensure responsible adoption of these advanced technologies, AWS has upskilled public sector staff within the Victorian Government in the ethical use and application of artificial intelligence. This proactive approach guarantees that as Victoria embraces new technologies, it maintains the highest standards of security, privacy, and ethical considerations in service delivery.

AWS is also investing in Victoria's future workforce through innovative education partnerships. Working with Swinburne University of Technology, AWS has supported the Women in STEM Diploma of Applied Technologies – Cloud Technologies, a first-of-its-kind program at Swinburne that combines paid work with study. Students work at AWS three days a week while studying part-time for two days, creating job-ready talent while addressing both the technology skills gap and gender diversity in STEM fields. Having provided cloud skills training to over 400,000 individuals across Australia since 2017, this initiative demonstrates AWS's commitment to developing local talent and supporting Victoria's digital future. This new strategic agreement between the Victorian Government and AWS lays a strong foundation for a more innovative, efficient, and citizen-centric government, positioning Victoria at the forefront of digital service delivery.

Next up, AWS and Code for Schools partner to empower the next generation of Australia’s AI builders.