The ICS function was created after the Machinery of Government Changes announced in February 2023.
It is a new shared corporate function supporting the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology and the Department for Energy Security & Net Zero.
Duncan Wood is the Deputy Director at DSIT.
“The GOV PaaS platform provided by the Government Digital Service was set to be decommissioned by the end of 2023. We were facing the task of migrating our web services to a permanent hosting environment before that deadline.
The Machinery of Government changes involved moving people and services into new Departmental structures. Some of our applications provide services to the public, so one of our major challenges was keeping consistency of service throughout the migration for those customers.
Another key issue was ensuring that the applications were adequately documented and that they passed the requirements of the new platform before the move. Of course, we also needed the new platform to be highly secure, easy to manage, efficient on cost and time, and scalable for the future.
Databarracks was able to provide that consistency and organisation by working closely with the application owners from the beginning. Having the Databarracks team’s experience in leading projects like this was invaluable. They held weekly meetings with our internal technical teams, so the migration, the lead-up to it, and the eventual handover were seamless.
Having the Databarracks team’s experience in leading projects like this was invaluable.
Databarracks created distributed, but centrally managed and monitored solutions within the public cloud.
“Databarracks used AWS’s Landing Zone Accelerator to deploy a cloud foundation that is architected to align with AWS best practices and multiple global compliance frameworks.
With this solution, customers with highly regulated workloads and complex compliance requirements can better manage and govern their multi-account environment.
Each account configuration and management is done with the Infrastructure as Code approach, with a special focus on code reusability standardisation and security using multiple tools to run Static Code Analysis to catch any misconfiguration before it is applied to the infrastructure.”
The partnership approach.
“Databarracks understands our organisation’s needs and how they’ve developed. Accordingly, their team created a tailored solution and can manage those needs over time.
Reusable code maximises efficiency for us and makes our individual applications easier and faster to modify when needed. As the services we provide continue to grow with our users, this will be increasingly important. The team at Databarracks also provided training to our own staffers, meaning we can address any problems internally if necessary.
Using a multi-account framework gives us segregation between the different organisations we support. That in turn gives us better control over individual services and accounts and can transparently chargeback on the services they’ve consumed. In simple terms, it means it’s easier for us to track our spending. We’re happy to say we came in under budget and on schedule for the project.
Finally, the decision to use the AWS landing zone accelerator means we have integrated policies for data security and compliance, which is a great feature for extra peace of mind.”