First launched in December 2013, TasALERT has grown to be an essential information source in emergencies and a hub for information to help Tasmanians plan for and recover from natural disasters and events.

Following 8 years of successful operation, TasALERT’s role was expanded to become the single point of online communication regarding fires, floods and other hazards which were previously published on other Tasmanian Government emergency service websites.

Hobart based digital agency Ionata Digital was selected to redevelop TasALERT and migrate the platform to the AWS public cloud. 

“From our experience hosting the Tasmania Police website we knew that emergency warnings during natural disasters result in huge peaks in traffic,” explains Ionata Digital Managing Director Martin Anderson. “With support from our partners at AWS, we designed a solution for TasALERT which makes use of AWS’s elastic load balancing and autoscaling to scale-up required resources to meet demand while keeping all of the Tasmanian Government’s data within Australia.”

The new TasALERT website has already been tested with the major flooding events impacting the east coast of Australia. During October 2022 Tasmania experienced significant flooding events which resulted in community evacuations and wide ranging road closures and public warnings being issued. Throughout the flooding event, Acting Premier Michael Ferguson urged Tasmanians to keep track of warnings on the TasAlert website. 

“Traffic to TasALERT was up over 1750% week on week during the flooding event,” said Martin Anderson. “We were very pleased with the performance of the site during the extreme weather event with the site delivering essential information to people in need.”