26th October 2026
Building a stronger foundation for the cloud
City of Prospect Council reduced the burden of managing on-premise infrastructure through a smooth migration to Civica Altitude, with minimal disruption for staff.
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Reduced infrastructure management
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Simplified migration journey
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Minimal disruption to staff
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Supporting the council’s long-term cloud strategy.
For many years the City of Prospect had relied on Authority 7.1 as its trusted ERP platform. Its migration to Civica Altitude was the next step in its cloud strategy, providing a modern platform that reduces the burden of maintaining legacy infrastructure while supporting more efficient service delivery.
As one of Adelaide’s smallest authorities, with around 100 internal staff and approximately 17 field staff, the council needed a solution that could scale to its size while supporting long-term digital transformation goals.
The decision to move to the cloud aligned closely with the council’s broader technology strategy.
From a strategic and risk management perspective, the move reflects a broader shift across local government toward cloud-based ERP platforms, enabling Civica Altitude to better support service delivery to the community.
Council infrastructure modernisation
Prior to the migration, City of Prospect Council operated Authority on-premise within a hosted data centre environment 20 kilometres away. This required the technology team to maintain servers, databases, infrastructure and ongoing system patching.
Data centres can be expensive, with capital investment for equipment often running into hundreds of thousands of dollars – around $300,000 worth of infrastructure.
The transition to Altitude shifted much of that responsibility to Civica, allowing the council to focus more on business improvement and service delivery rather than infrastructure maintenance.
The shift away from maintaining legacy infrastructure internally places greater responsibility with the vendor and allows the technology team to focus on delivering better business outcomes.
Preparing for a smooth cloud migration
The council’s migration journey was made significantly easier by groundwork completed before the move to Altitude. Prior to transitioning to Altitude, the organisation upgraded its environment to Authority 7.1 and implemented Procure to Pay on-premise.
This ensured council was already operating on Civica’s latest supported release before undertaking the migration to the cloud-based platform.
Bringing the environment up to date before moving to the cloud made the transition significantly easier, making it more of a lift-and-shift process than a major transformation project.
By implementing the recommended prerequisites ahead of time, the council minimised disruption and simplified change management across the organisation.
Minimising disruption for council staff
For most staff, the transition to Altitude required no retraining because the core functionality and workflows remained familiar.
For the majority of the organisation, the system continued to operate in much the same way, with staff mainly adjusting to cosmetic interface changes.
The only area requiring targeted training was accounts receivable, where new cloud-based functionality introduced some process changes.
The accounts receivable team required some additional support and training, but otherwise the transition was straightforward for staff.
Supporting core council operations in the cloud
Today, Altitude supports a broad range of council operations including finance, rates and property management, procurement, CRM, customer requests, eCommerce payments and cash receipting.
The platform also integrates with the council’s electronic document management system and other line-of-business applications.
The successful migration has become an important stepping stone in the council’s broader cloud strategy, with additional systems now being transitioned away from the data centre environment.
The move is about more than technology modernisation; it also strengthens security, reduces operational complexity and enables smarter ways of working.
Maintaining systems for councils is complex and security is paramount. Moving to Altitude places responsibility for securing and maintaining the platform with Civica while supporting compliance with the frameworks councils are required to follow.
Momentum through collaboration
The project also highlighted the collaborative nature of the migration and the support provided throughout the process.
A project control group was established to provide clear oversight and direction throughout the migration. The group brought together key representatives from across the organisation to guide project activities, monitor progress, resolve issues and ensure decisions were made in a timely and coordinated way.
This structure also supported effective stakeholder engagement by ensuring impacted teams were kept informed, business requirements were understood, and any process changes were managed with the right level of input from staff. It helped maintain momentum across the project while reducing the risk of gaps in communication or change management. Overall, the project progressed smoothly, with strong project support helping to ensure a successful transition for the organisation.