Council has a combination of self-managed Wide Area Network (WAN) services which have been implemented to support specific facilities and their associated cost.

In alignment with the Council’s Information and Communication Technology’s (ICT) Strategic Plan and in response to a security assessment of the Water Infrastructure Services (WIS) SCADA network, Council has conducted a review of the existing network architecture. The review provided strategic direction regarding the future state architecture of Councils WAN and addressed the security requirements of the operational technology (OT) infrastructure in the WIS SCADA network. The review recommended the phased implementation of an “SDWAN SaaS Solution integrated Security and Network Centralised Platform”.

Works are being undertaken in a separate, but inter-related project by WIS to deploy a Digital Radio over IP (Aprisa SR+ 4RF) network to provide collection points for remote SCADA enabled sites. This shall replace the existing analogue network currently servicing WIS sites and is expected to begin site construction works this calendar year. WIS network data flows are broadly defined as telemetry data, and this data collection has specific critical transport requirements in relation to security, integrity and confidentiality.

Council utilises a Sophos Unified Threat Management (UTM) solution in conjunction with the Sophos Remote Ethernet Device (RED) to connect many sites (approximately 40). They are used for several reasons including rapid deployment, mobile requirement (i.e. trucks), CCTV sites, and sites with mobile coverage only. This UTM is approaching end of life and the SDWAN solution will replace this functionality.

Council is proposing the introduction and implementation of an SDWAN solution to address the above issues and to more broadly address issues relating to best practice in managing cyber security.

The anticipated benefits of the project are:

• WIS

   o Alignment with ACSC Essential Eight Level 1.

   o Addressing requirements under the Water Supply Act (Safety and Reliability).

   o Improved WAN availability, reliability and resilience.

• ICT

   o Flexibility in design.

   o Ease of management in security and Mandatory Access Controls (MACs)

   o Enhanced security

   o Increased resiliency

The implementation phase of this project is to deploy an SDWAN design solution including hardware, software and management plane to Council Sophos RED sites, critical WIS sites and the yet to be deployed digital radio network base station sites. It is anticipated that this would include approximately eighty (80) sites. These sites will range from:

• Unmanned sites providing telemetry monitoring, video surveillance only,

• Digital Radio Base Stations,

• Small Offices,

• Regional Offices and,

• Data Centres.

The approximate number and size of these sites:

• 2 x Data Centres (1 x leased, 1 x Council Premises),

• 40 x Small sites – currently serviced by IPSeC tunnels over 4G/nbn broadband providing CCTV, 10 staff – best effort bandwidth,

• 20 x Small mainly unmanned SCADA/Telemetry sites – guaranteed low bandwidth requirement,

• 20 x medium sites with up to 50 users with Corporate Applications, CCTV, Building Management System – guaranteed high speed bandwidth.

Through the design phase of this project, the successful offeror shall first undertake a discovery phase to fully understand how Council uses its existing WAN services and what the requirements are of each group within the organisation. Following this, the offeror shall develop a design and implementation strategy for an SDWAN solution to service Council in line with the ICTs Strategic Plan.

Council shall host a briefing session during the RFO period, and attendance at this may be in person at Councils Toowoomba premises or via Microsoft Teams. Participants must register to attend this briefing session.

Registration for briefing session

Must be requested by 12.00pm Monday 24 June 2024 by emailing financialservicescontracting@tr.qld.gov.au

Briefing session

11.00am Tuesday, 25 June 2024

In order to obtain a copy of the full suite of tender documents, please complete and return the Confidentiality Disclosure Deed Poll to financialservicescontracting@tr.qld.gov.au.

Upon receipt, you will be provided with the full tender package.