How the Home Office moved immigration services to the cloud

Last year's cloud services award winners, the Home Office moved to AWS to future-proof its operations

Moving from a traditional on-premises IT infrastructure to a more agile, cloud-based set up can be a challenging undertaking particularly if you are having to migrate large volumes of sensitive data and applications. It is especially hard for public sector organisations because of regulatory constraints and the presence of multiple stakeholders, often with opposing needs.

Their success in delivering one of the UK government's largest ever cloud transformation projects impressed the judges at the UK IT Awards sufficiently for them to grant the team responsible for the Home Office Immigration Technology Cloud Transformation project the 'Best use of Cloud Services' award last year.

The project included an extensive migration to AWS, including moving large volumes of data. It involved 10 third-party organisations and 27 data hosts. The project went from initial feasibility assessment through to support services immediately after the migration. The migration itself took five days to complete.

The overall aim of the new platform was to enable new more agile ways of working at the UK Visas and Immigration Enforcement division of the Home Office and to create a platform for digital transformation allowing for future expansion.

As well as moving data to AWS the programme supported a shift to a more DevOps-focused way of working, including moving to infrastructure automatically deployed as code and using containers to ensure that applications run in the same way across different environments. This measure alone reduced production time from code to integration testing from one day to just six minutes.

The project has already delivered substantially increased availability of facilities to development teams, an improvement in the availability of customer-facing services, and better data protection and compliance procedures.

In a wider context, the migration to AWS has created a stable platform to establish better data sharing within and between government departments and a scalable foundation for further development as the needs of the immigration service change and emerge, for example in support of Brexit requirements.

Ultimately the move to the cloud has allowed the department to take a more person-centric view of immigration applications and to speed up their processing, the department said.

The Home Office was a big winner at last year's UK IT Awards. This year's awards are now open for entries. There are 29 categories covering everything from personal achievement to company-wide excellence. Enter now!