The Customer

Fitness Australia exists to professionalise the fitness industry by engaging in partnerships, advocacy, delivering education, quality, and accreditation. Both on a national and international stage, they represent the entire Australian Fitness Industry. This includes working with Government on a local, state and federal level for best outcomes, responding to and providing information to media as the go-to credible source, and forming international alliances to learn and grow the fitness industry on home soil.

Fitness Australia also administers the Australian Register of Exercise Professionals and ensures that those who have the skills and qualifications to deliver safe and effective exercise services to the Australian community are registered to practice. Not only does this provide credibility to those on it, but it also provides a level of assurance and confidence for consumers, employers and health professionals.

Overall, Fitness Australia supports the industry to deliver an environment for more Australians to adopt a healthy, active lifestyle.

The Challenge

Fitness Australia maintained its data in a bespoke database, built on legacy systems. Though it was built specifically to their needs at the time, their current environment was deemed out of date and required changes to the code and improvements to the architecture to provide the business with an increased level of stability and security.

During discovery and discussion, it was also apparent that the type of data currently being collected and stored is subject to PCI DSS, GDPR and Australian Privacy Amendment (Notifiable Data Breaches) Act 2017 (Privacy Act 1988). Their failure to be able to provide adequate proof of compliance during an audit, but more specifically after a data breach, could result in significant fines.

The Solution

AC3 provided Fitness Australia with experience cloud consulting and engineering assistance, along a migration process to enable a seamless transition to AWS. As Fitness Australia required a lot of architectural changes, AC3 worked closely with their team to understand their systems to ensure the resulting cloud architecture was in line with AWS best practice and the solution is designed for high availability, scalability, performance, and security.

In addition to architecting, deploying and supporting the Fitness Australia environment, AC3 also built an automation tool that allows developers to easily spin-up and spin-down fully provisioned environments, ready for UAT, load-testing, integration, development, and staging – supporting agile development and a DevOps culture.

The Result

When the phases of migration and re-architecture were fully delivered, Fitness Australia were able to experience increased availability and resiliency through the appropriate use of cloud for their application. They experienced stable connectivity for both internal access and customer access to the application, which positively impacts their bottom line. With increased agility and reduced project delivery times, they were able to go to market faster and gave their technical teams more control and flexibility to focus on the more important tasks. From a financial perspective, Fitness Australia were able to leverage the model to come up with a variable incremental funding structure which is a more consistent fit with their organisational income, allowing them to more effectively manage funds and unlock cost savings.

This Cloud Re-architecture and Optimisation Delivery engagement form just one part of AC3’s end-to-end cloud and professional services offerings. Fitness Australia is continuing a partnership with AC3 to support them to achieve their business goals and to deliver and exceed their customer’s expectations.

“Our experience with AC3 has been amazing so far. The speed at which they respond to our queries was next to none. With the work that they’ve done and had the most reliable solution architects for the project, we were able to experience greater levels of internal and external customer retention which will hopefully help generate more revenue for our company. The cloud re-architecture and optimisation delivery is just one part of the full cycle of cloud and professional services we are doing with AC3. We trust them and we know they will deliver the best results for us.”

Lisa Agic, Systems Administration and Technology Manager