Transforming Technology Practices and Increasing Cyber Security Posture

The South Australian Tertiary Admissions Centre (SATAC) is responsible for assessing students’ academic and non-academic qualifications, and ranking eligible applicants for tertiary education courses.

When SATAC leadership was looking to conduct an assessment and subsequent uplift of their overall technology capability, Chamonix was engaged to provide a review across two key areas of the business.

Our Approach

The immediate need was to support SATAC with a timely review of its existing technology and data capabilities, which would identify areas where there were opportunities to support delivery of their digital strategy.  The team was able to determine and summarise a number of key changes that would help to optimise the SATAC technology landscape.

The key areas were two-fold:

Scope for SATAC to leverage greater support of contemporary technology practices and partners to address some of the gaps that had become apparent through the technological evolution of the organisation and;

Identification and improvement of SATAC’s cyber and risk position.

Our approach to applying the relevant solution to SATAC’s needs was to send in in a multi-faceted team to review a range of areas; from business and technology advisory as the first domain was business and ways of working, and subsequently infrastructure and security, application architecture, data architecture and cyber security.

Our Recommendations

Following week two, the team was able to pinpoint some significant cyber gaps. Because of our approach, we didn’t need to wait to remediate these, and we could develop a plan for separate pieces of work specifically to address the issue at hand.

Key to the success of the engagement was that the team worked in parallel. Domain experts were able to share findings with the broader team immediately, and collectively we could work through the wider impacts and implications to other areas. The highly consultative process we employed lead to significant time savings and other efficiencies.

Unlike some traditional methods, rather than waiting until the end of the engagements to reveal our findings and options, we consulted back to the leadership team on a weekly committee basis. This meant that the team was able to cover everything in a faster, more robust fashion and that by the time we got back to the engagement sponsor, there were no surprises as he’d been engaged in the process throughout, and he was well equipped to steer the committee in the appropriate direction.

The ongoing alignment between strategy and advisory translated into a smooth transition to immediate implementation. SATAC now have a strong foundation set in place upon which they can continue to build.