Case study
HMCTS Court Store and Bench Moves to AWS
Summary
The HMCTS Court Store and Bench applications have historically been hosted on the UKCloud’s elevated platform, managed and supported by CACI. In 2021 however, the decision was taken to move the hosting of these projects onto the
AWS platform, with ongoing support in the new environment. CACI was tasked with ensuring the move was achieved in as short a time frame as possible whilst observing the highest level of security.
Company size
18,500
Industry
Government
Services used
Challenge
Due to the complexity of the UKCloud solution and application software stack, we decided to migrate the solution in its existing state from UKCloud to AWS. The environments consisted of four AWS accounts and eight Virtual Private Cloud environments. The approach was to split the project into two stages.
In view of the tight timescales, the order of this migration was to first focus on production, with the pre-production environment to be established after go-live. This order was acknowledged by all parties that whilst being far from ideal, there was no alternative. One of the biggest challenges was the volume of data to be migrated from one cloud provider to the other: in excess of 20Tb.
Stage one environments
Production, sandbox and performance
Stage two environments
Pre-production
Solution
The migration project consisted of several phases:
- Provisioning a base AWS Infrastructure and protective monitoring setup
- Export of Virtual Machines in UKCloud and import into AWS as AMIs
- Provisioning/cloning of AMIs
- Re-configuration of the application stack, on-VM protective monitoring/backups and internal operability testing
- Intersystem Connectivity and Operation, Connectivity Testing
- Configuration of G-Suite and novation of domain from MoJ to CACI
- End-user testing
- IT Health Check
- Operational Readiness Testing
- Data Migration
CACI’s role was as follows:
- Solution design
- Migration plan
- Infrastructure and protective monitoring
- Import of Virtual Machine images and data transfer
- Testing: OAT, ITHC
- Cutover
- Overall project management, including other parties: SopraSteria, HMCTS and other MoJ departments
Results
HMCTS can now continue to run its Court Store and Bench operations in the knowledge there is little likelihood of a breakdown in service.
Based on CACI’s experience of migrating similar workloads, this move to AWS also achieved other improvements such as:
- Use of infrastructure as code: better change management, less human error, increase of delivery quality and reduction in build time
- Use of AWS security services to increase view of security posture and simplify implementation of some security controls (e.g. encryption, identity and access management)
Other highlights:
- Completed the project two months ahead of time
- Ongoing data storage cost savings are in the region of 65%
