Thredbo Resort

Thredbo Resort, located in Australia’s Snowy Mountains, is a premier year-round adventure destination. Recognised as ‘Australia’s Best Ski Resort’ for six consecutive years, Thredbo Resort thrives in providing tourists with outdoor adventure and entertainment experiences. In the post-pandemic era of booming domestic travel, Thredbo stands out by offering both premium and great value local experiences. 

Thredbo’s main challenge was to adapt their business model to the seasonality of their operations. With significant peaks in both summer and winter months, the resort needed a technology solution that could flex with these cycles. Traditional CAPEX costs in Spring or Autumn were no longer sustainable as visitor traffic and technology use dropped by up to 80% during these periods. The goal was to automate and tailor services for reduced capacity and consumption, thereby generating significant savings to enhance customer experiences on the slopes.

Drivers for swift cloud adoption 

With the anticipated visitation for the 2023 Summer season, the team at Thredbo were focused on creating seamless customer experiences to drive customer satisfaction, by ensuring they can integrate to everything available, and most of all be connected. To achieve this objective, they outlined a clear set of goals to guide the decision-making process:   

Focus on visitor experience, not on ordinary tasks 

Key to Thredbo’s success is focusing on how people enjoy the activities they have to offer. With a lean operational team, innovating with a focus on automation and modern tooling so that business operations are light touch was critical in freeing up time to focus on enhancing the visitors’ experience. 

Networking redundancy with wired and wireless diverse paths 

Connectivity to all external endpoints and vendor API’s during any regional event is crucial. As Thredbo is a regional location and situated in a national park, it is more exposed to threats from natural events (i.e. storms, wind etc). Ensuring that access to anything externally across multiple networks is critical. 

Stable and reliable core critical infrastructure 

Ensuring that services provisioned are operating with strong, stable and reliable environments is paramount above all other service usage. Downtime of any type has immediate and severe impact to customer experience and potential revenue. With stability of services, impacts of outages would soften and reduced the risk of impacting the customer experience. 

Swift migration, with best practice architecture 

Versent was carefully chosen through a thorough selection process to manage the planning, execution, and transition of Thredbo’s workloads, using modern strategies for both Non-Production and Production environments. These workloads, running on a significant number of servers with Microsoft Windows and Microsoft SQL Server (Clustered), are all business-critical. They can handle up to 1000 transactions per second during peak seasonal periods. 

The migration of these services was performed securely and swiftly within a span of less than three months, finishing in December 2022. This timing ensured that the Summer Holiday Session of 2022/2023 experienced no disruption due to the migration. 

“Our team collaborated closely with Thredbo to meet all their requirements promptly and efficiently, using modern techniques. The solutions we implemented for all critical workloads adhered to industry’s best security standards and patterns, using top-tier orchestration tools like AWS Cloudformation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) patterns. All applications were peer-reviewed by Versent’s wider community, aligning with the AWS Well Architected Framework” – Justyn Green, Practice Lead Cloud, Versent.

Versent also identified the varying complexities among the critical workloads and discovered other workloads that could be improved. This process reassured Thredbo that their transition to AWS would not disrupt any integrations or compromise security. All architectural patterns underwent a stringent feedback cycle to prioritise the best design practices, focusing on efficient deployments. This was crucial in minimising downtime during the migration, giving Thredbo confidence that all their data would be safely and efficiently transferred to AWS. 

“Our collaboration with Versent has been pivotal for Thredbo. By migrating to AWS and leveraging their expertise, we’ve been able to adapt our technology for the seasonal demands of our business which has led to improved efficiency. This allows us to focus on what truly matters – creating unforgettable experiences for our visitors. The stable and reliable infrastructure provided by AWS enables us to futureproof our business for continued growth”, Andrew Turner, Group GM Technology & Digital Thredbo.

Future Steps 

Thredbo Resort aims to revolutionise customer experiences further, leveraging the technology available to their teams. The resort is planning to invest in services that could stretch across their business platforms to drive innovation in areas such as digital mountain access and mobile innovation. 

Thredbo’s partnership with Versent has been instrumental in this transformative process, and Versent is proud of the work conducted with the Thredbo team. The benefits of this project will continue to unlock future capabilities for the resort, cementing its position as Australia’s premier adventure destination. 

Find out how Versent can help you on your cloud journey here.