Azul empowers Ausgrid to solve Java Audit Risk and cost

Azul has revealed that Ausgrid, the largest electricity distributor on Australia’s east coast, has migrated its Java applications to the Azul Platform Core. The project reduced its Java licensing costs by 80%, and the firm also saw a 99% reduction in vulnerabilities across its IT environment. Before Azul, the electricity distributor had relied on Oracle for its Java platform and support.

Ausgrid supplies power to 1.8 million customers, serving around 4 million Australians. Across Sydney, the Central Coast and Hunter regions of New South Wales. Its 4,000 employees rely on hundreds of applications to provide the services.

The Ausgrid IT team constantly reviews expenditure across its IT landscape, conscious of the complexity. It migrated many of its workloads to the Azure cloud in 2019. By 2023, a large percentage were running on Azure. However, it noted that costs rose by 25% in the first six months of 2023.

The firm turned to Kyndryl and its Cloud Spend Optimisation Assessment. Kyndryl identified 1,264 potential optimisation savings opportunities. It isn’t clear whether Java was one of these. However, as part of the Windows 11 upgrade process, one of Ausgrids partners identified potential savings and risks around its current Java application estate.

The problem with Oracle Java

In January 2023, Oracle announced a new licensing strategic (strategy??) and support pricing plan for Azul. The new plan was based on an organisation’s employees, rather than those who actually used a Java application. Many existing Java applications were managed by teams outside IT, making them harder to evaluate and manage. That also meant that many applications were running on older versions of Java, many of which had vulnerabilities, and that few teams were set up to update Java to the latest version.

The exposure to additional licensing costs, potentially totalling $500,000, and the risks highlighted by the various versions of Java led to a recommendation that the organisation move to the Azul platform.

Glen Parker, Senior Partner Solutions Manager at Ausgrid. “Oracle’s license subscription model was very aggressive, and I was aware of their ability to move the goalposts again at any time. This represented a risk we weren’t willing to carry forward.”

The project

Ausgrid therefore sought a solution that would manage the Java estate at a lower, more reasonable cost. And remove many of the cybersecurity vulnerabilities highlighted in the existing Java applications. It selected the Azul Core Platform as a suitable replacement for Oracle. An initial proof of concept was conducted across three applications to validate the platform in Ausgrid’s varied device environment.

Parker added, “The Azul Platform Core POCs gave us confidence that migrating to an OpenJDK alternative was the right approach. We saw first-hand that moving off Oracle Java wouldn’t cause any disruption, which was an important milestone in our evaluation.”

The full migration was completed in under two months; as a result, Ausgrid reduced its Java security vulnerabilities by 99%.

Parker continued, “In addition, we were able to reduce our large volume of outstanding Java-related vulnerabilities by 99%. With Azul Platform Core, we now have a modern, well-supported Java platform with clear, predictable licensing — and the confidence of knowing we’ll be covered in the event Oracle comes knocking to perform an audit of our Java usage.”

Dean Vaughan, Vice President of APAC at Azul, commented, “Ausgrid’s proactive approach shows how critical it is for enterprises to address Java licensing and security risks before they become compliance crises.

“By moving to Azul Platform Core, Ausgrid successfully eliminated three significant business issues in one initiative: audit anxiety, substantial and unplanned license costs, and associated cybersecurity vulnerabilities.”

Enterprise Times: What does this mean

Azul now has several recognised logos using its platform within ANZ. The University of Sydney is another organisation that has moved from Oracle to Azul and may have been a reference to Ausgrid. It also moved to Azul as a result of Oracle’s licensing change.

No doubt there are still more organisations within ANZ using the Oracle Java Stack. With vulnerabilities across multiple legacy versions in use and licensing costs higher than alternatives, including Azul.

What is missing from this announcement is the challenges the organisation faced during the migration of its legacy applications. However, it seems that this was accomplished fairly easily, given the timescale.

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