Defence to expand its Vera M365 environment

Defence is set to expand its use of Microsoft 365 services over the next three years, building on a pandemic-era implementation of Teams known as Vera.

The goal to “migrate to a cloud-based productivity, unified communications and collaboration suite” is central to a productivity-themed priority area of the three-year Defence Digital Strategy and Roadmap that was launched in August.

Defence has an existing Microsoft 365 environment, called Vera, which it describes as delivering “collaboration and file-sharing capability” to users “inside and outside the Defence Protected Environment”.

“Productivity is really a substantive element [of the digital strategy and roadmap] that will impact the day-to-day workflows in this organisation,” Defence chief information officer Chris Crozier said.

Vera is based on Microsoft Teams. Other Microsoft productivity tools are still served from on-premises infrastructure and software, requiring some adjustment required compared to Crozier’s previous private-sector employers such as Orica and BHP.

Crozier, for example, arrived at Defence from an organisation that had been an early adopter of Microsoft 365 Copilot.

“I was very keen to get on Copilot,” he said.

“My previous employer was customer 21 for Copilot [globally], and the first non-US-based customer, so I was very keen to get onto Copilot, but it became very apparent very quickly that we were not architected for that, that we were actually on-premises for everything other than Teams.”

That will change significantly under the Defence Digital Strategy and Roadmap, however.

“I want this organisation, the 125,000 employees in Defence, to be able to get the benefit of something like an M365 cloud on a day-to-day basis for collaboration and productivity,” Crozier said.

Doing so will also lead to some changes in the way Teams is architected and M365 traffic is handled.

“We will be able to leverage a modern software-defined internet gateway so that we don't have 17 jump-off points between you and I on a Teams call. We will have three, which is the design standard,” Crozier said.

“We also won’t do break-and-inspect on video and voice traffic, which we do today.

“That's some very specific examples where we have architected to meet standards within Defence at a point in time, which are no longer fit-for-purpose when you're moving into a modern, performant platform.

“We will have the necessary cyber security and management tools that come with M365 in the cloud environment, but we will be able to provide a much richer experience for individuals.”