UK Home Office: Delivering faster, more reliable visa…

The UK Visas & Immigration and Immigration Enforcement directorates of the Home Office are transforming their services. New technology is making it faster and easier for people to apply for visas and for Home Office staff to make millions of decisions each year.

As the transformation progressed, it became clear their existing cloud hosting platform was inadequate. The Home Office asked us to help them move the entire infrastructure to a new cloud partner – and make the transition without disrupting the critical services they deliver each day.

Our IT assurance and delivery experts joined forces with the Home Office team and other partners to design and manage the transition. We collaborated at every stage, from an initial feasibility assessment through to early-life support once the infrastructure was up and running. Keys to success included working closely with business stakeholders and third-party suppliers, using an agile methodology, managing the plan rigorously and having the right technical expertise.

This was one of the largest and most complex UK public sector cloud transformation projects to date – staff will be able to handle over a million cases a year. And the switchover itself took five days.

The new platform is making the new digital systems faster and more reliable for members of the public and staff handling cases. The new infrastructure supporting the platform also allows the technology team to build and release new capability in six minutes instead of a day. And decommissioning older technology saves £4 million a year. The Home Office team are now well-equipped to continue developing innovative digital services quickly and effectively.

PA partnered with us to deliver one of the largest and most complex cloud transformation projects in government. They worked alongside us to plan, manage and execute a five-day switchover to AWS, without disrupting any of our critical public services. I had absolute trust in the PA team to work with us to make the complex transition to AWS successful. They had the commitment and the expertise that we needed to deliver, supporting initial feasibility through to early life support. PA are a genuinely collaborative partner. They excel at operating in a complex, multi-supplier environment and are able to ensure all multiple stakeholders are focused on a single, aligned objective. With PA’s support, the Home Office is now well-equipped to deliver innovative digital services more quickly, more reliably and at a much lower cost.”

Ian Phoenix, Delivery Director, Immigration Platform Technologies (IPT)

The Home Office Immigration Technology Cloud Transformation is a winner of the 2017 UK IT Industry Award for ‘Best Use of Cloud Services’ and Cloud Excellence Awards 2017 for “Best Overall Use of Cloud”.