The Department of Transport has been working with Google Cloud to modernise its core technology to be a «cloud-first» organisation by 2020. 

The DfT announced that for the past two years, the two organisations have been working to reinventing internal service delivery and introduces new digital capabilities for DfT staff.

Prior to moving to the cloud, it was resource-intensive for DfT to maintain servers, manage backups and ensure the overall health of the IT systems, the organisation said. As a result, simple utilisation and querying tasks often required days to complete.

A part of the problem was that its data centres lacked the scalability to match DfT’s longer-term needs as it looked to undertake bigger and more complex data initiatives.

In an effort to build the capabilities it required, DfT and Google Cloud migrated a large proportion of the former’s applications to the public cloud. Over the course of 12 months, DfT said it has successfully completed the migration of hundreds of virtual machines to the Google Cloud Platform. According to the DfT, this has allowed it to decommission a large chunk of its on-premises infrastructure while improving the reliability, resilience and security of its systems.

Over 100TBs of application data has been migrated from an internal cluster into BigQuery, reducing data search time from up to five days down to mere seconds

The partnership with Google Cloud is helping the DfT to become a more digital and data-driven organisation, according to said Mark Lyons, the interim CIO for DfT. He said the capabilities the platform offers are helping it to use data better to support decision-making, policy-making, reporting and governance, as well as provide new digital services to engage with citizens on transport-related initiatives.

«We’ve been excited to go on this journey with Google Cloud,» said Lyons. «When you have finite resources, having a partner that understands the process of change and can direct your focus to the things that really matter is invaluable. We’ve invested in this as a long-term partnership and are excited for Google Cloud to remain our number one cloud platform provider.»