Digital

Going live with our first customer using the Cloud Migration Service

February 2, 2022 by Stewart Hamilton No Comments | Category Cloud 1st, Digital Scotland

Blog by Serena Nusing, Dragos Leonte, and Ross Clements, Cloud and Digital Services Division, Digital Directorate.

A little over a year ago we kicked off our first pilot and started our journey to develop a new service for the Scottish Government (SG) and the wider public sector to migrate their applications, data, and workloads to the SG Cloud Platform.

By doing so, we’re supporting the delivery of Scotland’s Digital Strategy by enabling public services to be delivered in a more secure and efficient way. The Cloud Migration Service has been developed as part of the Cloud First Programme.

When we started this work, we didn’t know what the exact process would look like nor what would be required for the service to meet the user and business needs.

However, as our user research had identified a number of common blockers for public sector organisations trying to make the move to cloud – we knew that there is a strong demand for a service to support their move to cloud.

Starting small and iterating constantly

We chose to conduct a pilot as an initial implementation to prove the viability of the service. Following an iterative agile approach, we had to be very flexible and adaptive throughout the whole process focusing on designing a minimum viable service first. Our approach was user-focused, and we developed the service as we were working with our customers, to learn and evolve constantly.

By working with a pilot organisation our goal was to:

● Define what customer engagement needs to look like
● Determine the minimum viable service required to deliver a technical migration
● Develop a support framework to show how support post migration would be provided to our customer
● Establish collaboration patterns with our technical delivery partners
● Use the lessons learned to further develop our processes and procedures.

Delivering our first pilot

This week we went live with our first Cloud Migration Service pilot, with the R100 team as our customer. The purpose of the R100 programme is to connect every premise in Scotland with broadband that has a minimum speed of 30 Mbps. The R100 team needs to be able to publish and consume data with increasing frequency to meet user needs. By moving to cloud, the R100 benefits from:

● reduced administrative tasks,
● improved resilience of infrastructure
● increased ability to consume and publish data from other systems.

Our first pilot has been delivered in partnership with the IT service provider Leidos as they met our immediate needs of providing the technical expertise and resources. Critically, we’re not designing the service to promote one IT service provider and Leidos have not provided any bespoke services. Moving forward, we’re planning to work with different IT service providers to ensure the best suitable service for our customers.

The Cloud Migration Service supported R100 with their move to cloud by:

● Developing the business case for cloud
● Conducting business architecture analysis
● Selecting and on-boarding IT service provider
● Upskilling the R100 team in agile ways of working
● Evaluating performance and security requirements
● Establishing the technical design collaboratively with the R100 team and Leidos
● Ensuring technical migration meets the cloud principles
● Supporting on-boarding to the SG cloud platform

What’s coming next

We’re now in the process of delivering our second pilot and the focus of the next year is to:
● complete the alpha phase
● establish the SG cloud platform
● define a delivery roadmap
● develop a sustainable operation model.

The aspiration is to create a comprehensive service that will continuously evolve to meet the changing requirements of our customers.

If you have any questions or if you would like to request help from the Cloud Programme please feel free to get in touch via email: Cloud1st@gov.scot

Tags: Agile approach, cloud 1st, cloud migration, Pilot, scottish government, SG Cloud platform, user research

Comments