Secure Platform for company shareholder elections, proxy's, surveys,
private and public sector ballots.
Secure Vote began life as part of a US company election.com but was purchased by the Australian
Security Mail Group of Companies over two years ago. Today Secure Vote conduct numerous elections,
AGM's, proxies and surveys for a range of Australian organisations including local government,
government departments, publicly listed companies, associations, clubs, educational institutions,
universities, credit unions and employee unions.
Secure Vote's main business is managing the distribution, receipt and counting of ballots
and providing the reporting and audit trail for either attendance, postal or electronic ballots.
They specialise in what is called a hybrid ballot, part paper ballot and part electronic ballot
(IVR or Internet). Their expertise apart from project and logistics management is to assure
that the roll and votes are reconciled to insure one vote per participant.
If you have ever cast an electronic vote then it's likely your votes were counted and managed
on Secure Vote's servers.
As part of a US company they previously used a system hosted in the US which presented
four main problems:
- privacy legislation that prohibits the hosting of Australian citizen data outside of Australian
jurisdiction
- difficulty handling postal votes
- managing US and Australian time zones as any election has strict time rules
- planned outages occurring at inconvenient times for Australian time zones.
These issues often prevented Secure Vote from winning business so an Australian solution
had to be found. The answer after months looking at the alternatives was Macquarie Intellicentre.
“Gateway Certification the Security standard for Federal Government and BS 7799 Accreditation
the International Security Benchmark set the Intellicentre apart from any other centres in
Australia” commented Ian Parker Chief Technical Officer and Privacy Officer at Secure Vote.
“When the government evaluates suppliers for elections they go through a rigorous vetting
process that has been made very simple for us by Macquarie Telecom's existing accreditations”.
“When we looked at the ‘build versus host' business case we learnt that we could never
justify building a site with enough physical security, power backup through redundant grids,
UPS backup and long term generator back up, not to mention 24 x 7 staffing of such a facility.”
“We evaluated a number of suppliers and Macquarie Telecom was the most cost effective solution.
Today I can say that we have had zero down time since day one. One of our servers had a disk
failure at 3am and all I had to do was approve a new drive, the drive backup kicked in and
the failed drive was hot swapped out without any disruption to our services”.
“Our costs and service levels have been on track all the way. I love the way the team at
Macquarie Telecom is so available, I can always get one of my team and any of them can pick
up the ball and run with it.”
“We noticed a real improvement in performance over the US hosted solution:
- No more time zone issues
- Easier for us to manage in Australia
- No more surprise outages”
“Our Macquarie solution is better than we could have ever built ourselves in many ways
and definitely more cost effective”
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