How Trustmarque deployed a secure and scalable public cloud platform in Microsoft Azure for Capita Local Public Services
Overview
A Trustmarque partnership to develop a virtual datacentre environment in Microsoft Azure to migrate Capita Local Public Services on-premise call centre applications to the cloud.
Background to the project
Capita Local Public Services (CLPS) is on a journey to achieving a cloud-first approach through digital transformation. Part of that vision is to modernise its datacentre infrastructure, migrating on-premise workloads to the cloud.
Within the last two years, CLPS began to refresh one of the platforms that supports business process outsourcing services under Capita Local Government Official Environment (CLOE). The process involved building a new service comprising Windows and Linux virtual machines in Microsoft Azure.
CLPS recognised the benefits of migrating those environments to Azure, including greater cost savings, scalability and agility. They realised Azure could provide the freedom and flexibility needed to offer additional services, removing the long lead times associated with expanding or modifying legacy on-premise infrastructure.
To utilise the full capabilities of public cloud, they needed a strategic partner to help manage the design, build and deployment of a virtual datacentre in Microsoft Azure. They needed consultancy and technical expertise needed to manage a complex end to end migration.
The approach
The consultancy and migration to Microsoft Azure aligned to the following steps:
Discovery session
To determine the right design for the virtual datacentre, the engagement started with an extensive discovery session to define the scope of work, objectives and dependencies. The project delivery was then aligned to three key milestones:
Milestone 1 – Design
Trustmarque held a significant review of the existing CLOE infrastructure to assess use cases, dependencies, applications and files against the target platform. This culminated in a high-level design of the new Azure environment.
Milestone 2 – Build and deploy
Trustmarque’s Technical Consultants built the core infrastructure to meet the agreed design principles utilising best practice methodologies. This was then piloted through user acceptance testing before being deployed to the production user community.
Milestone 3 – Project handover
To ensure CLPS Azure users can effectively manage the virtual datacentre moving forward, the project handover included extensive knowledge transfer and user training including an operational handover.
The design
It was imperative that the new environment was achieved with minimal disruption. This meant alignment to existing performance, security and management needs for workloads and clients hosted in the current on-premise environment. It was also important to provide secure connectivity to existing clients and links available in Capita’s Integrated Communications Hub.
The new Azure virtual datacentre, was designed to meet Public Sector Network (PSN), National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and Microsoft best practice guidance as defined in the Azure Blueprint for the UK Government’s Cloud Security Principles and included:
- Virtual datacentre hub and spoke topology
- Virtual Network Appliance firewalls (Palo Alto)
- Hub to contain shared components such as connectivity
- Fully compliant infrastructure for PSN
- Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery Manager vaulting
- Security Centre and Monitoring
Outcomes and next steps
Through the development of the new Azure datacentre, Capita Local Public Services has achieved a safe, secure and scalable virtual datacentre from which to accelerate their cloud first strategy.
About the customer
Capita Local Public Services (CLPS) delivers a wide range of specialist services to local authorities, schools, academies, and other public sector organisations in the UK. Services include: IT and digital transformation, customer management, finance, property development, regulatory services, education support and back office processing. This service specifically enables the delivery of Revenues and Benefits business processing to a number of UK local authorities. CLPS employs approximately 2300 staff with offices based in 57 locations across the UK.
Why Trustmarque was selected as a partner
CLPS recognised Trustmarque’s extensive experience in helping customers to adopt Azure public cloud and to reap the benefits of infrastructure modernisation.
As a top tier Gold level partner to Microsoft, we have more than 30 years’ experience working together to help customers to transform and accelerate through smart IT investments. We are committed to creating an Azure centre of cloud excellence, through Cloudmarque – a bespoke open source reference architecture designed to unlock innovation across the industry.
CLPS was confident in our experience, skills and tried and tested approach, including a commitment to best-practice methodologies. We were able to provide the strategy, design, migration and implementation support needed to achieve a resilient server environment.
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