Enabling seamless Azure migration

HMRC is the UK’s tax, payments and customs authority, and has a vital purpose: to collect the money that pays for the UK’s public services and help families and individuals with targeted financial support. It does this by being impartial and increasingly effective and efficient in its administration. The organisation helps the honest majority to get their tax right and makes it hard for the dishonest minority to cheat the system.

HMRC is the UK’s tax, payments and customs authority and is in the process of transforming over 650 complex business services. Through its ‘Securing our Technical Future’ (SOTF) programme, it aims to migrate and transform systems from current legacy environments to a combination of public cloud and Crown Hosting private cloud (a data centre facility available to all UK public sector organisations).

Since 2004, Fujitsu has supported HMRC’s vision ‘to become a digitally-advanced tax administration’. In order to do this, it has delivered critical national infrastructure (CNI) services across areas including infrastructure/platform management services, cloud services, service risk identification/mitigation, end user computing (EUC) and networking services, hosting and data centre management and provision of the Trader Support Service (facilitating trade between the UK and Northern Ireland)

Following a successful tender bid, Fujitsu were tasked with the migration of 13 HMRC business services (across a number of the department’s citizen-facing business lines), via rehost and replatform to Azure Cloud. A key challenge was that discovery and service support were both customer and customer managed, supplier-led activities.

Fujitsu augmented discovery data initially provided through a Fujitsu-led analysis and architectural process, which included structured workshops involving both technical representatives and service owners from HMRC. The engagement helped establish a joint agile team consisting of Azure and migration experts from Fujitsu and across the supplier landscape. This empowered HMRC and facilitated knowledge transfer throughout the project lifecycle.

Fujitsu ensured system discovery started concurrently with the migration activities through an alternative supplier. A number of the systems in the scope of migration had technology debt considerations which required evaluation against the customer’s remediation programmes.

In addition, Fujitsu also had to adhere to customer security controls and consider its risk posture as a result of moving to the cloud. It needed to apply an agile framework into a well-established process organisation, while handing communication complexity with the business systems environments and different customer groups involved. A detailed, responsible, accountable, consulted and informed (RACI) chart was developed to ensure fully defined responsibilities and deliverables from the outset.

As a result of this careful planning, Fujitsu was able to define a clear engagement strategy for all stakeholders ensuring that all work was executed collaboratively. It was able to establish sites for consistent information sharing and undertake a full risk and dependency assessment early in the lifecycle with resolution or escalation before they occur.

It also leveraged dif ferent migration strategies as required to support the business and technical migration requirements, including replatforming to support operating system upgrades and rehosting using the Azure Migrate automation tool. At the same time, the team identified multiple opportunities to drive and improve customer processes. Fujitsu identified technology gaps and drove additional technical capabilities that are now consumable across the customer estate.

By involving business and IT stakeholders from inception with robust, detailed planning, it has nabled working towards a common goal whilst instilling a culture of ‘one team’ across the supplier landscape. The project also provides a framework for accelerating future migrations to Azure Cloud, one that will be used across Fujitsu’s DX Hub to support HMRC’s ongoing journey towards business transformation.

"Fujitsu and HMRC worked seamlessly together to ensure the smooth migration of these vital services without disrupting the business,” comments Jo Connew, SOTF Programme Director, HMRC. “It sets us in good stead for future projects and gives our users today a better experience and improved performance".