Interactive Partners with the City of Port Phillip to future-proof essential community services
Interactive, one of Australia’s leading IT service providers, has partnered with the City of Port Phillip to deliver a major digital transformation, migrating the council’s legacy systems from a heritage-listed site to a secure, scalable cloud environment.
The City of Port Phillip, based in the iconic St Kilda Town Hall, faced significant challenges maintaining modern IT infrastructure within the physical limitations of a 100-year-old building. With hundreds of vital community services dependent on always-on systems, even minor outages risked major service disruption.
When a critical environmental risk was found in the council’s on-premises server room, just metres from mission-critical racks, Port Phillip’s IT leadership recognised an urgent need to modernise.
The City of Port Phillip was looking for a solution, all while knowing structural changes were not an option.
If the city’s racks went down, the whole city’s operations - including more than 100 community services - would be brought to a standstill. There was a need to better protect IT operations.
Interactive delivered a two-phased migration strategy that combined speed, stability and forward-looking design. Within three months, Interactive had relocated the council’s systems to a secure colocation facility, completing the migration over weekends to ensure no interruption to public-facing services.
Interactive was on call for hands-on troubleshooting, including rapid response to unexpected challenges. When a core network switch failed late at night during the migration, Interactive had a replacement sourced, configured and operational within hours, maintaining critical business continuity.
Following the rapid migration, Interactive supported key infrastructure upgrades to bolster resilience and future scalability. This included uplifting disaster recovery services, the rollout of NetApp Keystone storage with full managed services and implementation of 24/7 monitoring and incident response.
The City of Port Phillip saw a dramatic drop in major outages, with feedback from teams citing faster application speeds and more responsive systems. In addition, Interactive helped improve the security posture, removing end-of-life hardware and implementing network security on firewalls.
The team operates as more than just a data centre provider, more like a true one-stop shop across networking, hardware, cloud, support and project management.
With our core systems running more efficiently and securely, our internal teams are free to plan long-term strategic initiatives including multi-cloud adoption and AI-driven service enhancements.
David Forrest, Account Executive at Interactive, said the project is a blueprint for how local government can embrace digital transformation under pressure.
“The City of Port Phillip has shown proactivity and leadership. Despite the complexity and constraints, they made bold decisions that prioritised service continuity and long-term resilience. We’re proud to have been their partner in that journey.”
The migration established a trusted and collaborative relationship between Interactive and the City of Port Phillip. What started as a high-pressure infrastructure challenge became a shared success story built on transparency, responsiveness and mutual respect.
Interactive’s managed private cloud solution delivered enhanced security, operational stability and scalability, ensuring that the council can continue delivering high-quality digital services to its community, no matter what the future holds.
