AMP selects CSC's cloud services

AMP, one of Australia’s leading wealth management companies, has selected one of CSC’s cloud computing services after an extensive evaluation.

Under the agreement, CSC will provide AMP with Collaborative Online Services (COS), CSC’s private cloud-based email and collaboration solution providing feature-rich email, instant messaging and team collaboration, based on the Microsoft product set (Exchange, Office Communication Server and SharePoint).

COS is hosted locally in Australia by CSC on the best-of-breed Virtual Computing Environment platform comprising integrated technologies from VMware, Cisco and EMC.

"AMP has chosen email and collaboration tools as the first production system to progress on their cloud roadmap. We are extremely pleased that AMP has chosen CSC to assist them on this journey and we look forward to working closely with them as the company continues with strategic plans to take further advantage of cloud-based services,” said Matthew Day, Vice-President, Financial Services, Health and Public Sector for CSC in Australia.

AMP’s IT Director Service Management Sharmini Sivathas said, “For the past 18 months AMP has been exploring strategies to increase the use of cloud-based services. Starting with low-risk services, we embarked upon a multivendor pilot for email and collaboration services as our first production services to move to the cloud.

“Financial benefits were a key consideration for us, along with interoperability with our current environment, and confidence in our chosen service partner. The Microsoft product suite, the COS solution and delivery by our long-standing IT partner CSC are key components of AMP’s technology roadmap,” Sivathas concluded.

COS is hosted onshore in an Australian data centre, reducing concerns over data sovereignty and assuring compliance to Australia’s privacy regulations while also avoiding performance latency issues and the high network costs associated with using offshore cloud computing services.