Our clients were several UK government ministries struggling with their cloud ecosystems. Terabytes of critical data needed to be served to thousands of users each day in numerous locations across the UK, and our clients’ existing cloud platforms could not handle intense demand. Servers were regularly overloaded, meaning extended downtime and plummeting performance. Lack of data access was delaying important ministry decisionmaking, whilst network outages were preventing citizens accessing essential services. Without change, billions of pounds of investment into ‘Cloud First’ digitisation policy would be wasted, and the operation of high-priority services impeded. A brand new cloud strategy was essential to ensure high uptime and performance – but the real challenge was ensuring this did not increase public spending
Our first port of call was to explore the existing architecture to understand bottlenecks and target change for a maximal performance boost. Our experts reached out to our cloud contacts to verify our plans, and finalised three different ecosystem structures capable of ensuring performant servers. We presented these to our clients, who opted for the market-leading AWS platform. Our primary concern was to migrate our clients to powerful AWS Virtual Machines on AWS EC2. The next step involved separation of systems into segmented architectures and the introduction of AWS redundancy servers. This allowed rolling maintenance without downtime whilst introducing higher resilience and limiting risk of data loss. Finally, our cloud specialists wrote strict AWS CloudFormation and Terraform provisioning policy to ensure limitless scalability and elasticity – guaranteeing performance whilst slashing cost
