Eastleigh Borough Council (EBC) is an award-winning local council winning the ‘Council of the Year’ by APSE (Association of Public Service Excellence). The organisation takes a progressive approach to frontline service delivery. It supports the needs of 129,000 residents, local businesses, and 500+ employees across multiple sites.

The EBC were looking at what options were available to move away from their ageing on-premises data centre infrastructure, while future proofing their legacy application running their key back-office systems. Due to the reliance of services delivered to residents and local businesses by EBC and the requirement to migrate without any disruptions to those services, the customer decided to migrate to AWS using Bytes.

During the early stages of the project, Bytes performed an assessment of the existing server estate to identify current on-premise costs and compared that with an AWS cloud based solution. Through this initial stage, Bytes successfully supported EBC with establishing a business case and a clear decision of the technical and financial benefits of operating in the cloud.

With a clear business case established, Bytes then performed detailed analysis of EBC's workloads to ensure the migration path was fully understood and planned to minimise the impact to the councils public services. This included target architectural designs and a pilot migration to validate findings and ensure that the council was ready to support their future cloud services. Finally, Bytes conducted the workload migrations according to an agreed plan.

The solution that Bytes designed and implemented for ECB consisted of test, production and DR environments and included AWS services such as AWS CloudFormation, AWS Database Migration Service, and Amazon S3 to optimise the Council's infrastructure for cost, performance, and scalability. The solution was then secured using AWS SSO, Amazon GuardDuty and AW Security Hub. CloudHealth was implemented to carry out security posture analysis and cost optimisation monitoring.

With the help of Bytes AWS specialists, EBC were able to discover a platform which was suitable to meet their aims and provided more benefits than just scalability. They have also been able to reduce their carbon footprint and lower electricity costs each time a server is migrated to the cloud. These compounded savings also mean future cloud migrations will be increasingly affordable for the council. Using assessment data to drive the cloud migration has enabled the council’s in-house IT team, allowing them to reach their data management goals independently. Using the AWS cloud platform instead of the outdated on-premises data centre infrastructure, allows for increased flexibility and security for the EBC. In addition to this, shifting to the cloud helps to protect key legacy applications for the future with minimal spend. The council can now use all its software as normal however, without the risk of system failure as business-critical data is stored on service not servers.