Enabling government data transition
11 August 2018
Project: Facilitating migration
Customer: BEIS
Location: UK
In line with the Government’s strategy and best practice to adopt a public cloud first policy, in 2017 the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) decided to move and upgrade their end user technology. This was from a laptop/desktop LAN service in a secure hosting environment with two separate legacy domains – to a laptop, mobile phone, Wi-Fi and Office365 service for e-mail and applications, with storage based in the cloud, using Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web-Services.
The upgrade centred on offering all BEIS users a single desktop environment, removing the need for the two separate domains. All users within BEIS (and the Department for International Trade) would receive a laptop and mobile phone, which enables them to access all the required services through Wi-Fi or tethered through their mobile.
The target for setting up the services to facilitate the BEIS migration plan was the end of December 2017. This was achieved successfully with effective collaboration and responsiveness across BEIS and FCDO Services.
BEIS requested assistance from FCDO Services to set up and enable access to their mailboxes, sharepoint and file server data to facilitate the transfer of the data to the new solution. An FCDO Services Project Manager was appointed in October 2017 to manage the requirement which involved the development, set-up and management of additional servers to assist BEIS with their project and assist with a design to enable users to ‘reachback’ to business applications that would not be able to be migrated. Nine separate business change requests were received for FCDO Services to impact assess, respond and facilitate.
The target for setting up the services to facilitate the BEIS migration plan was the end of December 2017. This was achieved successfully with effective collaboration and responsiveness across BEIS and FCDO Services. It was successfully tested with a pilot phase in December and BEIS’s migration project commenced on the 8 January 2018. The service has remained stable and operational since and is on target to complete by the end of May 2018.