The museum, located in Sydney, is administered by the federal Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts and underwent a strategic review two years ago to assess its IT and digital outreach capability.

The review resulted in Karen Holt's appointment as the museum's head of IT services in January 2010 and a wider IT transformation project is in the pipeline for the next two years.

Holt presides over corporate IT, online services including Web and digital media, and records management.

"Until recently the IT team was comprised on one or two business contractors who supported the museum servers, cabling and desktops," Holt says. "We will only have a small technical team so it's important to have an infrastructure they can manage."

Holt began looking at a mix of hosting, cloud and on-premise infrastructure to best support the limited in-house skill set. The museum has been "fairly well served" for most of the past decade by Novell GroupWise on Windows, but issues around disc space, feature limitations, lack of smartphone support and an unintuitive interface forced it to look at alternatives.