Helping a UK government organisation migrate to the cloud and modernise sustainably
Key highlights
2
200
250
94%
Project overview
A UK government organisation known as Companies House managed substantial ageing physical hardware, operating systems, and applications within two on-premises data centres. Companies House wanted to modernise its infrastructure, so we worked to consolidate the IT estate and migrate to the cloud by adopting PaaS (Platform as a Service)- providing a more reliable, cost-effective and environmentally friendly hosting service.
The challenge
Companies House had been maintaining their own infrastructure for many years however this was no longer seen as cost-effective for several reasons. It required the organisation to constantly maintain skills across a wide range of technologies, hardware maintenance and licencing fees were rising, and the costs associated with providing power and cooling for two data centres was becoming cost-prohibitive.
There was also a need to increase the resilience and capacity of existing services. They wanted the ability to flexibly scale their services to meet user demand and ensure they were delivering value and a great user experience.
The solution
To help solve the challenges the organisation was facing the decision was made to move all IT infrastructure and services out of their data centres and into the cloud. A multi-cloud strategy was adopted and we worked closely with the team to build and implement this, we migrated all front end services to AWS and back end services were migrated to Azure.
Due to the complexity of the legacy infrastructure and applications and to meet the timescales of the project we utilised rehosting and re-platforming as the basis of the migration strategy. We also migrated what we could to PaaS offerings to ensure a full exit from the data centres and to avoid costly relicensing fees for applications.
To ensure that Companies House had a solid foundation for their cloud migration and enable them to build and deploy applications in a scalable way we built a secure landing zone to underpin all services. It leveraged automation tooling and CICD pipelines to achieve a repeatable deployment model that would allow continued expansion in the future.
We worked closely with the internal IT team throughout the full migration, working as a blended migration team to ensure the transfer of knowledge and key skills. We empowered the team through knowledge sharing and ran deep-dive sessions with the team to guarantee that they had the skills and training to enable them to manage and adapt to the new changing landscape.
Throughout the migration the team were always vigilant of the commitment to sustainability and carbon reduction within the UK Government, they worked to make sure that the migration and optimisation of applications would provide a significant impact on reducing the carbon emissions of the IT infrastructure used by the organisation – using our Cloud Carbon Reduction Calculator we were able to reduce their carbon emissions by 94%!
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