The challenge

New technology is transforming the way immigration services are delivered; making it faster and easier for members of the public to apply for visas and for Home Office staff to make millions of decisions each year.

These systems of critical national importance are dependent on a complex, cloud-based infrastructure. The Home Office identified that its existing hosting platform lacked the scalability and stability necessary to support its ambitious transformation agenda. Faced with the need to improve delivery efficiency, test capabilities and service performance, they selected the Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) hosting platform.

With the existing architecture consisting of more than 1,400 servers containing a vast amount of data, 27 data hosts and 36 external interfaces, this was not a simple lift and shift; it involved the migration of a very large infrastructure and vast amounts of data whilst maintaining continuity of business services.

The outcome

Our consultants, architects and engineers worked in partnership alongside Civil Servants and other Home Office suppliers to jointly achieve one of the largest cloud transformation projects (AWS migration) in Europe. The Home Office is fundamental to the security and safety of the UK, acting as the lead government department for immigration and passports, drugs policy, crime, fire, counter-terrorism and the police.

The results that matter

• 6point6 played a key role in planning, enabling and executing the Cloud Migration to Amazon Web Services (AWS), by providing Digital Transformation, Cyber Security and Data Platform services to the Home Office in one of the largest cloud transformation programmes undertaken by government.
• The redesigned and simplified infrastructure has improved the stability and resilience of the Home Office’s cloud environment, enhanced reliability of deployment and improved the security of the production service.
• It has also increased the ability to scale and to optimise infrastructure costs. This has resulted in more efficient and better protected digital services, ready and available for operational business and live services.