Aussie Broadband tables a detailed new technology strategy

Aussie Broadband has outlined a six-pillar technology strategy aimed at making IT more trusted and able to underpin an ambitious growth plan over the next three years.

Chief technology officer Brad Parker told an investor day that the six pillars are “intrinsic security, strategy and architecture, technology transformation, technology innovation, operational excellence and delivery excellence”.

“To achieve our ambition, we continue the maturation of our technology delivery and execution functions, we continue the uplift of our platforms and services, and we continue the enhancing of the software developed across the group, all in order to develop secure, scalable systems that provide the foundation for continued growth, achievement of efficiencies and increased capabilities to accelerate delivery,” Parker said.

The technology efforts roll up into a broader business strategy called ‘Look to 28’. This sets up some strategic ambitions for the group, including increasing group revenue by circa 35 percent, and securing an NBN market share of at least 11 percent within three years.

Parker said that technology and business objectives sometimes became misaligned “in many industries”.

“As we continue to grow, we need to ensure that our technology solutions and investments are aligned with the needs of the business and are guided by our overall corporate strategy,” he said.

“In many industries that I’ve worked in, this critical connection is often lost, with the ‘tech heads’ working on technology architectures, on projects and initiatives that don’t deliver business value. 

“Aussie [Broadband] knows better. We are committing to achieving this through our strategy and architecture aspirations, by first evolving the technology engagement model from one of ‘cool technology’ to one where our business segment leaders view technology as a trusted partner, and provide a role that is essential to achieving strategic goals.”

Security and trust

Parker outlined a detailed roadmap of security capability uplift and upgrades intended to meet the “intrinsic security” pillar of the new technology strategy.

“Security is an imperative,” he said. “In the past year, the telco industry has seen considerable increases in both attempted and successful cyber attacks. 

“Our aspiration for intrinsic security revolves around one key principle: trust. Customers, partners, employees and shareholders trust us to deliver the most reliable and secure platforms and services.”

Parker said that Aussie Broadband will expand its security operations centre (SOC) “to provide a robust line of defence in-depth against cyber threats”.

On the technical front, it also intends to implement “an Aussie-wide identity framework that securely provides access to group assets”; to “expand its vulnerability management capabilities to exceed our resolution targets”; to implement “a secure access service edge (SASE) solution to consolidate and streamline [its] security management while enhancing [its] overall security posture”; to deploy “robust data loss prevention, new encryption and new endpoint security controls.”

Additionally, Parker flagged continued investment in “strengthening and maturing our  security culture by addressing social engineering attacks.”

Other internal security efforts aim to prepare Aussie Broadband to meet its security of critical infrastructure or SoCI obligations.

“The Aussie Broadband Group has been designated by the government as critical infrastructure due to the significant role we play in providing core services to Australians,” Parker said.

“Aussie has commenced its journey to meet the obligations under the SoCI Act, and I am confident we will meet our level one and level two requirements well in advance of the government-imposed deadlines. 

“The SoCI reforms place additional requirements on Aussie, including minimum cyber security standards and mandatory reporting for the telecommunications sector risk management policy.”

Technology transformation

Parker also outlined “technology transformation” plans “ to establish common core systems and processes” across the group. 

It intends to “evolve [its] core network and core internal cloud platforms, the management of its operational and business support system (OSS/BSS) stacks, and to unify the different voice services stacks currently used across the group, which has grown recently through acquisition.

There are multiple goals at play here.

One is to improve resiliency by having backend platforms “with ‘utility’ levels of availability, performance and reliability.”

“We intend to be leaders in operational excellence,” Parker said.

Another goal is to ensure Aussie Broadband is set up to capitalise on NBN Co’s shift to higher speed plans in September this year, and – more broadly – to differentiate in what will be an increasingly crowded residential market.

“Globally, the telco industry has spent the past 20 years replacing the so-called last mile or the connection from the telco network into the home or business. This is true in Australia as well with NBN Co’s continued focus on upgrading the legacy copper networks,” Parker said.

“These fibre-to-the-premises upgrades remove or significantly reduce legacy performance, capacity and physical reach constraints that previous technologies like DSL had. 

“As these upgrades near completion, differentiation between providers will become less about last-mile speed and providers instead will compete in over-the-top capabilities, customer engagement, delivery and enablement, the in-home and in-business experience at the point of use, and the core network performance due to the characteristics of how these high-speed technologies are operated.”

Buddy as a digital and AI testbed

A key callout in Aussie Broadband’s presentation is that its digital-first offshoot, Buddy, will increasingly be used as a test environment for innovative technology systems and experiences, before broader group deployment.

“Our technology aspiration makes it clear that we want to be the drivers of actual innovation,” Parker said.

“We continue to transform our customer in-home experience and are researching new capabilities in the space. We intend to bring those experiences to life first through our Buddy brand. 

“There’s a lot of hype and a lot of false promises from AI and generative AI, but we have identified several key areas where we believe AI and their adjacent tools will add value to our systems and processes.”

Internal cloud hosts first workloads

Parker also offered a brief update on an internal cloud environment that Aussie Broadband has stood up to support and host its systems.

He said that the “first production workloads are deploying now” into the environment.

While the environment had previously been positioned as a way for Aussie Broadband to shrink its data centre footprint and exit older virtualisation and container technologies, Parker indicated that risk associated with VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom also may have played a part.

Other Australian organisations have similarly sought to move away from large-scale VMware deployments to de-risk against price rises following the virtualisation company’s acquisition.

“We view this [internal cloud] platform as the building block for many of the other initiatives we have shared, providing multi-modal compute with numerous platform-as-a-service features,” Parker said.

“These infrastructure capabilities provide in turn the basis of our re-platforming initiatives. 

“To date, we are delivering this platform to plan, within budget and are beginning to realise significant cost avoidance savings by redeploying workloads previously destined for Broadcom-based compute platforms.”

“We can deploy new environments in hours compared to months on our previous platform.”

Parker also indicated the newer internal cloud environment demonstrated higher availability, resiliency, maintainability and support for “multiple workload types” over its predecessor.